Human-Robot Cooperation with Torque-Controlled Light-Weight Robots in the Context of Future Manufacturing and Personal Assistance, public talk by Alin Albu-Schäffer (DLR-German Aerospace Center)

Abstract:
Industry 4.0 stays for a manufacturing concept which fully exploits the online digital interconnection between all participants in the manufacturing process, from supplier over CAD developer to the production work-floor, including product components and machines. But digitalization currently also revolutionizes healthcare. In this context it is expected that robots, which can directly exploit the digital data, will play an increasingly large role. However, automation alone still lacks flexibility in complex manufacturing processes such as the final assembly in automotive industries. Same holds for healthcare support for the aging society, were the complexity and variety of tasks does not afford full autonomous solutions. Therefore, human-robot collaboration is a currently seen as a very promising alternative for the near future. In this talk I will address several aspects of human-robot collaborative industrial manufacturing and healthcare, starting from light-weight robot design over compliance, interaction and safety control up to new programming and application design aspects.

Short bio:
Alin Albu-Schäffer received his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Timisoara, Romania in 1993 and his Ph.D. in automatic control from the Technical University of Munich in 2002. Since 2012 he is the head of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which he joined in 1995 as a Ph.D. candidate. Moreover, he is a professor at the Technical University of Munich, holding the Chair for “Sensor Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems” at the Computer Science Department. His personal research interests include robot design, modeling and control, nonlinear control, flexible joint and variable compliance robots, impedance and force control, physical human-robot interaction, bio-inspired robot design and control. He received several awards, including the IEEE King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the Transactions on Robotics in 2012, several ICRA and IROS Best-Paper-Awards as well as the DLR Science Award.