INTELLIMAN - AI-Powered Manipulation System for Advanced Robotic Service, Manufacturing and Prosthetics

智能机器人的一个关键挑战是创造能够与周围世界直接互动以实现目标的机器人。另一方面，机器人操作是实现机器人学承诺的核心，因为机器人的定义要求它有可以用来改变世界的执行器。在过去的几十年里，关于机器人操作问题的研究有了很大的增长，其目的是利用越来越多的负担得起的机器人手臂和抓手来创造能够直接和自主地与世界互动的机器，以实现有用的应用。学习将是这种自主系统的核心，因为现实世界包含了太多的变化，机器人无法事先拥有关于周围环境、其中的物体或操纵它们所需技能的人类请求和行为的准确模型。IntelliMan项目的主要目标是关注“机器人如何有效地学习以有目的和高性能的方式进行操作”这一问题。IntelliMan将从人类演示中学习个人操作技能，到学习适合高级规划的操作任务的抽象描述，再到通过与对象交互来发现对象的功能，以保证性能和安全。IntelliMan旨在开发一种新型的具有持久学习能力的人工智能支持的操作系统，能够通过一组不同的传感器来感知周围环境的主要特征和特征，能够决定如何以自主的方式执行任务，并能够检测任务执行中的故障，以便通过与人类和环境的交互来请求新的知识。IntelliMan进一步调查了用户如何感知这种人工智能驱动的操作系统，以及哪些因素提高了人类的接受度。

A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly interacting with the world around them to achieve their goals. On the other hand, robot manipulation is central to achieve the promise of robotics, since the definition of robot requires that it has actuators that it can use to change the world. In the last decades, a substantial growth has been observed in research on the problem of robot manipulation, which aims to exploit the increasing availability of affordable robot arms and grippers to create machines capable of directly and autonomously interacting with the world to implement useful applications. Learning will be central to such autonomous systems, as the real world contains too many variations for a robot to have an accurate model of human requests and behaviour, of the surrounding environment, the objects in it, or the skills required to manipulate them, in advance. The main objective of the IntelliMan project is focusing on the question of “How a robot can efficiently learn to manipulate in a purposeful and highly performant way”. IntelliMan will range from learning individual manipulation skills from human demonstration, to learning abstract descriptions of a manipulation task suitable for high-level planning, to discovering an object’s functionality by interacting with it, to guarantee performance and safety. IntelliMan aims at developing a novel AI-Powered Manipulation System with persistent learning capabilities, able to perceive the main characteristics and features of its surrounding by means of a heterogeneous set of sensors, able to decide how to execute a task in an autonomous way and able to detect failures in the task execution in order to request new knowledge through the interaction with humans and the environment. IntelliMan further investigates how such AI-powered manipulation systems are perceived by the users and what factors enhance human acceptability.