Personal Robotics

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Overview
Personal Robots capable of monitoring, assisting, entertaining, and more broadly interacting with humans in unstructured environments could help solve important global problems, and would be comparable to the Personal Computer in terms of social and economic impact. These web pages are devoted to research at Intel Labs Seattle in the area of Personal Robotics; additional research in this area is being carried out by our colleagues at Intel Labs Pittsburgh. Professor Dieter Fox, the new director of Intel Labs Seattle, leads the Robotics and State Estimation Lab at the University of Washington, and we interact tightly with this group.

Table-top manipulation: Game playing robot arm Gambit
Intel Labs Seattle and University of Washington team, togther with Alium Labs, have created a table top manipulation system for tasks such as board game playing and human-robot co-manipulation tasks. The Intel / UW team entered and won the AAAI-2010 small scale manipulation contest. A video of the 4 contenstants is below.

The team, led by Dieter Fox, was composed of graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Washington, and researchers and engineers from Intel Labs Seattle. In addition to team leader Fox, the team included Cynthia Matuszek, Brian Mayton, Louis Legrand, Roberto Aimi (Alium), Robert Chu, Michael Kung, Liefeng Bo, Marc Deisenroth, and Joshua Smith.

The custom 6-dof robot arm, called Gambit, features a spherical wrist, parallel-jaw gripper, and two cameras. Instead of rigid opposing surfaces, the gripper paddles consist of an open frame covered in a compliant rubber material. This "opposing trampoline" gripper structure has proven to be surprisingly reliable for chess piece manipulation.

Mobile Manipulation
We believe that mobile manipulation capabilities are key building blocks for future Personal Robotics applications. Our research in sensing, perception, and machine learning is aimed at improving mobile manipulation capabilities to help catalyze the formation of a new Personal Robotics ecosystem. Our research results can be integrated and tested in our mobile manipulation platform Marvin (pictured below), which includes a WAM arm, Segway base, and Barrett Hand. The system runs ROS (Robot Operating System) maintained by Willow Garage.

Please see our Research page for information on projects that are underway now.