Dual Arm Manipulation

Shoe manufacturing provides employment to a large number of European citizens. Large parts of the manufacturing process are still dominated by manual work. Robotic solutions to automate and optimize the production can ensure that European companies, in particular manufacturers of high-quality, high-price fashion shoes, retain their competitive edge on the global markets. There are many sectors of industry, in particular industrial production, that have a strong need for practical, flexible, and human-like manipulation and gripping. This is true in particular for SMEs characterized by fast changing product-cycles and the need for robots that can be integrated in manual product lines. In general, all industrial sectors with a high percentage of manual labour, a large number of product variants, and non-standardized or delicate products do need robots that exhibit a general flexibility and the capacity for human-like manipulation. Shoe manufacturing is an example for an industrial sector ...

There are numerous and relevant application domains like inspection, maintenance, surveillance, and handling of non-uniform goods where the use of robots would be beneficial. This article addresses the reasons that make it difficult for a present-day robot to master these domains. The dual arm system AILA will be presented, which takes further steps in the direction of such a use case.