Robotics competitions may bring back the memory of an early episode of The Big Bang Theory, and, if Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj were real people, there is no doubt that they would be excited about some news from KUKA.
KUKA, the German robotics company, has announced that it will hold a robotics competition geared toward mobile manipulation application advancement and promoting the company’s youBot. The KUKA youBot is a mobile robot with a wide variety of uses. This versatile robotic platform must be part of the researcher’s system in order to win the Innovation in Mobile Manipulation Award and the prize purse of 20,000 Euros.
The KUKA youBot comes with multi-directional wheels, an on-board Mini-ITX PC with embedded CPU, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD Flash, USB capabilities and a 5-Direction of Freedom (DOF) manipulation arm with a dual finger gripper. The robot’s software is a version of Ubuntu Linux and it uses a C++ ROS wrapper.
According to Erico Guizzo of IEEE Spectrum (and one of the judges of the competition), MIT researchers have used the youBot to assemble IKEA furniture, a feat that most humans find challenging at the best of times. Since IKEA’s directions rarely make it easy to find the English explanation, it can only be assumed that the youBot also understands Swedish. All kidding aside, the youBot, renamed the “IKEA bots” used CAD files to assemble the furniture.
Describing the competition, Guizzo said, “If you don’t have a youBot, you can still come up with an application, and, if KUKA likes your idea, it will loan you a robot at no cost.” Participants can also rest assured that they retain the intellectual property involved. The deadline to register for the competition is June 15, and the award ceremony will take place at Automatica 2014, a robotics trade show.
