Mobile robotics is capturing a larger market share in the robotics industry. I previously wrote about this last June in a blog post entitled: 2015 Year of Mobile Manipulator? To continue on this topic, STAMINA (Sustainable and Reliable Robotics for Part Handling in Manufacturing Automation) is proving that a lot of people are combining their efforts to ratchet up the interest in mobile manipulation.
This project is the union of different industrial partners and educational institutions, who have the objective of building autonomous mobile platforms with the particular focus of automating warehouses. If you think about it, humans spend a lot of time looking for a particular item or part. This has become a very repetitive task for people working in warehouses. Using a solution such as STAMINA can reduce the stress/load on the human worker and leave them available for more “value added” tasks. The fact that robotic technology has introduced tools like collaborative robots and advanced sensors can allow robots to work alongside humans and not be dangerous for them. The path planning, object detection and grasping methods are also evolving and make the mobile platform capable of completing these tasks.
The cool thing about this project, is that there is no precise robot manufacturer or robot component manufacturer in the loop which makes them free to use whatever robot or robot tool they want. This allows for wider choices and greater potential in terms of solutions. Involving several universities has evolved the common knowledge at a faster rate and allows for ideas and innovations that would not have been possible to discover in a very focused industrial arena.
The work is focused on certain aspects of industry (mainly automotive, probably because they are already highly robotized) but can be used in a wider range of applications. The project is separated into different ''Work Packages'' to help the robot achieve its mobile manipulation. Take a look at the different work packages to get a better idea of what is going on in the different labs.
WP1: Integration, Testing, Use Case-definition, Validation and Evaluation
WP3: Skills for Differentiated Robot Fleets
WP4: Mission Tasks and Vertical Enterprise Integration
WP5: Knowledge Transfer; Dessemination and Exploitation
The website of STAMINA is also full of resources such as their Paper and Presentations section, where you can get most of the papers that were published on the projects. This can be a really useful resource if you are looking for information on the components used in a particular project. Especially if you are looking at a project that is related to one of these projects in any way.
Finally, the STAMINA project is still ongoing and scheduled to end only in March 2017. We might see some results prior to the end of this project, but you can bet there will be further information released as we get closer to this date. Can't wait to see how this project will end up, hopefully with great tools for any type of warehouse that wants to be automated with minimum effort and low cost.
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