Germany's Sensitive Human-Like Robot

Science-fiction movies have predicted it, but German researchers have actually built it: a robot with two arms, three cameras, finger-tip sensitivity and facial expressions.

Its name is the pi4-workerbot, and since it has basically the same size as a human, it can work at any modern standing or sitting workstation in an industrial manufacturing environment.

The pi4-workerbot is not only a German success, but also an European pride, since its purpose is to help maintain the competitiveness of the European production.

It is able to make more movements than any other normal robot and the most prized creation of the EU-funded PISA project, whose goal is to give flexibility to industrial mass production by using robots in the assembly processes.

“We developed the workerbot to be roughly the same size as a human being,” said Dr.-Ing. Dragoljub Surdilovic, head of the working group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK in Berlin.

The robot has three cameras, out of which the one on its forehead is a state-of-the-art 3D camera, capturing its general surroundings.

It can do several tasks, like “measure objects or inspect a variety of surfaces,” said Matthias Krinke, Managing Director of pi4-Robotics, the company which should get the robot onto the market.

For example, it can look at a chromed surface and see if the coating has been perfectly applied, depending on the way that light is reflected off the material.

Krinke adds that “if you use two different cameras, it can inspect one aspect with its left eye, and another with its right,” and apparently it can do that over a continuous 24-hour period, which in medical technology could prove very valuable.

As said before, the pi4-workerbot also has two arms, which, according to Surdilovic, “allows it to carry out new kinds of operations,” like transferring “a workpiece from one hand to the other.”

The researcher explains that “conventional robotic arms generally only have one swivel joint at the shoulder; all their other joints are articulated.

“In other words, they have six degrees of freedom, not seven like a human arm,” and also an additional rotation facility corresponding to the wrist of a human.

Surdilovic’s group developed the control system for the workerbot, and he recalls that it proved to be a very difficult task.

“Programming the two arms to work together – for example, to inspect a workpiece or assemble two components – was a real challenge. It requires additional sensor systems.”

And since the robot has been built by Germans, it also has finger-tip sensitivity and several facial expressions.

“If you set the strength of the grip correctly, it will take hold of an egg without cracking it,” says Surdilovic, and if it's doing a good job, it can smile happily.

There are chances that this is the best Christmas gift ever, for people who built it and for those that will afford buying it.