Unite! Seed Fund 2024 awards funding to 13 applications with Aalto's involvement
The Unite! Seed Fund aims to stimulate and support bottom-up proposals by teachers, researchers and students for collaborative activities.
Advancing robotics in harsh environments with the support of Unite! Seed Fund
While there has been a noticeable increase in the use of robots in predictable setups for repetitive tasks, the lack of robots operating in harsh environments is a pressing issue that requires attention. With the Unite! seed funding four universities in the alliance start building a consortium to tackle the problem. The project ´Towards fleets of robust and agile mobile robots in harsh environments´ is led by Assistant Professor Tomasz Kucner from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation at Aalto University.
A primary aim of robotics is to eliminate the necessity of human involvement in tedious, repetitious, strenuous, and hazardous tasks. Recently, there has been considerable success in the deployment of singular and collaborative robotic units in domains such as intralogistics, manufacturing, and agriculture where they have been instrumental in assisting workers with particularly arduous tasks such as picking, palletizing or transportation.
However, the usage of autonomous machines, designed to tackle tasks in severe environments like mining, forestry, and SAR, remains limited. Most of the existing solutions in these contexts either operate under human supervision or are teleoperated. Therefore, in this project, our objective is to discern the reasons for such limitations and develop a research and educational plan to confront them.
“Unite! played a pivotal role in facilitating the consortium-building efforts by enabling us to bring together a diverse group of partners essential for a promising EU consortium. Unite!'s support extends beyond providing funding; it creates significant opportunities for networking. As a result of these combined efforts, we have been able to rapidly establish connections among research environments with shared goals and complementary expertise”, says Assistant Professor Tomasz Kucner from Aalto University who coordinates the project.
The project consists of planning and development activities, leading to a sustainable, long lasting research environment capable of building a wide-ranging consortium spearheading research in the deployment of reliable robot fleets in challenging conditions. This will contribute to the advancement of industries in domains such as forestry, mining, and search and rescue (SAR) that require resilience, agility, and adaptability, creating a positive impact in these sectors.
Partners
Tomasz Piotr Kucner is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation at Aalto University. His research focuses on the robust operation of mobile robots in challenging shared environments, both individually and in fleets.
Jordi Sanchez Riera is an associate researcher at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI-UPC). As a member of the Perception and Manipulation group, his work focuses on advancing the perception, learning, and planning capabilities of robots.
Janusz Jakubiak is an assistant professor in the Department of Cybernetics and Robotics at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. His research is focused on algorithms of motion planning and control of mobile robots and mobile robot groups.
Gerald Steinbauer-Wagner is an associate professor and head of the Autonomous Intelligent System (AIS) group at Graz University of Technology. His research fields include decision-making and execution structures, action planning in various forms, monitoring and diagnosis of system components and behaviors, robot navigation in indoor and outdoor
environments, and explainable and trustworthy human-robot interaction.
More information
Assistant Professor Tomasz Piotr Kucner, email tomasz.kucner@aalto.fi
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