A robotic platform for building and exploiting digital product memories

Abstract

This chapter presents the design of the robotic platform AILA, a mobile dual-arm robot system developed as a research platform for investigating aspects of the currently booming multidisciplinary area of mobile manipulation. The robot integrates and allows in a single platform performance of research in most of the areas involved in autonomous robotics: navigation, mobile and dual-arm manipulation planning, active compliance and force control strategies, object recognition, scene representation, and semantic perception. AILA has 32 degrees of freedom (DOF), including 7-DOF arms, a 4-DOF torso, a 2-DOF head, and a mobile base equipped with 6 wheels, each of them with 2 degrees of freedom. Additionally, the left hand of the robot was equipped with a RFID reader in order to receive the information coming from the DPM. This chapter provides an overview of the design, the variety of sensors incorporated in the system, and its required control software.