07 October
3.15pm, LT308 Huxley
| Title: | Ocado’s Horizon 2020 Robotics Research Projects, SecondHands and Soma – The Challenges.. |
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| Abstract: | SecondHands: The subject of this project is a robot assistant that is trained to understand maintenance tasks so that it can either pro-actively or as a result of prompting, offer assistance to maintenance technicians performing routine and preventative maintenance. Conceptually the robot's task is to provide a second pair of hands to the maintenance engineer, such that once the robot has been trained it can predict when and how it can usefully provide help. The robot's behavioural repertoire is learnt in a training phase that includes the monitoring of maintenance technician activity, the construction of a knowledge base that describes the context of a task, and a theory of action that enables dynamic behaviour generation. The result is a set of competencies coupled with an ability to recognise the state of a task and an understanding of how these competencies can be usefully deployed given the state. The scope of work includes the construction of a robot assistant, the systems that facilitate the training, the actual training on a number of representative tasks, perceptual systems that facilitate activity recognition, and validation of the system's ability to usefully contribute to tasks in collaboration with a maintenance engineer. Assessment of the system will test its ability to recognise when it doesn't know something as well as its ability to generalise its knowledge to previously unseen tasks. Soma: This proposal explores a new avenue of robotic manipulation with the environment, as opposed to manipulation of or in the environment. In our approach, the physical constraints imposed by objects in the environment and the manipulandum itself are not regarded as obstacles, but rather as opportunities to guide functional hand pre-shaping, adaptive grasping, and affordance-guided manipulation of objects. The exploitation of these opportunities, which we refer to as environmental constraints (EC), enables robust grasping and manipulation in dynamic, open, and highly variable environments. The key ingredient for the exploitation of EC is softness of hands, i.e. their embodied ability to comply and adapt to features of the environment. The traditional paradigm for robotic manipulation is in complete disarray in front of this shift of focus: state-of-the-art grasp planners are targeted towards rigid hands and objects, and attempt to find algorithmic solutions to inherently complex, often ill-posed problems. Further complicating matters, the requirement of planning for soft, uncertain interactions between hand and environment is entirely beyond the state of the art. However, this is how humans most often use their hands, and how we plan to change robotic manipulation. |
| Speaker Details: | Alex Harvey
Alex Harvey is a Departmental Head at Ocado Technology, part of Ocado, the world's largest online-only grocery retailer. After studying Mechanical Engineering followed by Computer Science at Edinburgh university, Alex started his career as a software engineer and vibration analyst in the aerospace industry. He worked at a company called HGL Dynamics for a number of years and was subcontracted by HGL into Rolls-Royce as a vibration expert. Alex is particularly proud to have lead the redeveloped of the entire HGL analysis suite of applications as well as negotiating, specifying and managing the delivery, and after-sales support, of a condition monitoring and pro-active maintenance system that operates on all gas turbine powered Royal Navy surface ships. After joining Ocado in 2010, Alex worked as Project Manager delivering a second generation, highly efficient, goods to man picking system that has been deployed both in Hatfield and Dordon. Alex is now Head of Project Management and Research departments, responsible for a team of Project Managers and WMS (Warehouse Management System) Business Analysts and a team of Robotics & 3D Vision researchers and a Simulation & 3D Visualisation research team. In this role, Alex oversaw some of Ocado's recent projects, most notably the Morrisons ecommerce launch and has overseen the successful award of two EU Commission funded robotics research projects (Horizon 2020) with several high profile European universities. Alex is married with 2 children. In his spare time he likes to hike up Munroe’s in Scotland and spends as much time outdoors with his family. |
