Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation
Mobile Manipulators for Material Logistics and Handling
Innovative Autonomous and Intuitively Operated Service Robot for Efficient Handling and Logistics (ISABEL)
Industrial robotics has been making a significant contribution to manufacturers’ cost effectiveness and competiveness for decades. Service and assistive robotics also harbor significant untapped potentials in industry but the high complexity of such systems and the broad range of key technologies needed require highly developed hardware and software components in conjunction with innovative system designs and integration strategies.
The joint project ISABEL funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research is focused on the application field of material logistics and handling and examining fetch-and-carry tasks in work areas and environments shared with humans. Priorities are capabilities of autonomous picking and placing at stations and loading and removal of parts at machinery. Concretely, this is being done for the applications “semiconductor manufacturing” and “life science automation”.
The consortium’s members are KUKA Laboratories GmbH (coordinator, system integration), Infineon Technologies AG (semiconductor manufacturing use scenario), the Center for Life Science Automation at the University of Rostock (life science use scenario), macio GmbH (user interface), and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (planning algorithms and execution). The Fraunhofer IFF is in charge of sensor systems and perception.
