Flanders Make wins KUKA Innovation Award 2021
Innovation Award 2021: Artificial Intelligence Challenge
By adding artificial intelligence to existing robot systems, the aim is to revolutionize the way humans and robots work together. The Kuka Innovation Award 2021 therefore focused on new use cases in which robots have so far faced major challenges in interacting with their real environment. Among the numerous applications for the competition, an international jury of experts selected the five best concepts. One of those concepts was "Chorrobot" of Flanders Make and KULeuven.
At the Hannover Messe Digital Edition, which was broadcast entirely digitally due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the jury selected the winner of the Kuka Innovation Award 2021. We are proud to mention that "Team Chorrobot" came out as the winners of the award and the accompanying 20.000 euro.
Team Chorrobot
The goal of "Chorrobot" (of Challenging bimanual Operations using Reactive ROBOT control) of KULeuven and FlandersMake@.KULeuven is to leverage artificial intelligence in order to enhance the productivity of car manufacturers as well as small and medium-sized enterprises by facilitating and expediting the deployment of bimanual robot manipulation tasks. The concept enables users without extensive expertise in robotics to demonstrate some aspects of the task and to intuitively specify other aspects via a graphical user interface. This approach facilitates the commissioning of challenging bimanual tasks – including fixtureless assembly operations that involve non-rigid and non-fixed elements – as well as bimanual inspection operations in unstructured environments.