Second Hands Project

Ideal place to start with robot collaboration.

EU robotics project gives maintenance workers a ‘second pair of hands’
By PAUL SAWERS@PSAWERS in Venturebeat

A five year European Union (EU) project to develop a collaborative humanoid that helps workers in industrial environments has come to an end, with the participants touting breakthroughs in “AI learning, natural language processing, and robotic manipulation.”

The SecondHands project, born from the EU’s €80 billion ($87 billion) Horizon 2020 research program, set out back in 2015 to develop what it called a “second pair of hands” for workers in factories, warehouses, and other industrial locations. The aim was to create a robotic assistant that is “proactive” in helping technicians lift or carry objects, acting as an apprentice-like helper that carries out the less skilled facets of a job. The project was developed under the auspices of a consortium of researchers and computer scientists from a number of organizations, including Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL); Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT); Sapienza, University of Rome; University College London (UCL); and Ocado Technology, the technology division of the U.K.’s online-only grocery giant Ocado.  ... "