Main supervisor profile and contact: Prof. Raul Suárez <raul.suarez@upc.edu>

Institution: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Description of the job: Collaborative robots are getting more presence in the market and several open research points have still to be improved in order to increase the efficiency. One particular point is robot motion and task planning, which is the main topic of this work. The goal is to improve the existing approaches, or develop new ones, by exploiting the advantages of 5G communications, as its low latency and the possibility of the performing off-board computation based on the concept of edge computing. Planning in a dynamic environment or coordinating two robot arms to allow them working in a shared workspace are representative examples of the work to be done. Experimentation with real robotic platforms are expected to be carried out, for this purpose the Robotics Lab at IOC can provide different types of collaborative robots (static, mobile, single and dual-arm).

Mission: The aim of this work is to make the robots context-aware, adaptive to changes and responsive for agile robot-robot interactions, by exploiting the communication capabilities that 5G infrastructures give. This implies the following two objectives: 1) Equip robotic systems with a framework for perception and planning to give robots reactive capabilities. The reactive capability is expected to be provided by a fast perception/planning/action loop in order to react to dynamic obstacles in partially known and uncertain environments. 2) Exploit 5G communication features to optimize the on-board and off-board computational resources to efficiently implement the framework.

The proposal is expected to be validated in the IOC-UPC Robotics Lab considering either one or several robots, mobile or static manipulators (single or dual-arm) equipped with grippers or mechanical hands, performing (collaborative) manipulation tasks in an in-door human environment possibly shared with human operators.

Main functions:

1) Perception: Design and implementation of a distributed framework for perception based on a network of 2D and 3D cameras for capturing dynamic environments for motion planning purposes. 2) Planning: Design and implementation of a decentralized reactive motion planning approach based on two-layers: a) An on-board temporal coordination system between robots. b) A fast geometric planning mechanism per robot on the cloud edge servers based on a point-cloud modelling of the environment. 3) Communications: Development of the communication mechanisms to dynamically orchestrate the computational resources: a) Design of general criteria to move part of computational work from local agents (robots) to cloud edge servers managing multiple robots. b) Design and implementation of the communication manager. 4) Validation: Design and implementation of the experimental setup and execution of real experiments: a) Design of demonstrators to test the proposals. b) Integration of perception, planning, reasoning and managing modules. c) Execution of simulated and real experiments. 5) Dissemination of the technical results in world-class international conferences and journals.

Secondments: The work includes a secondment in project partner facilities of 18 months in Roboception (Munich, Germany) (advised by Dr. Michael Supa). The main research topic during the secondment is related with the perception tasks of the work.

Doctoral programme: The ESR will be enrolled in the UPC Doctoral programme

Requirements of the candidate

• Education level: Master on Engineering

• Degree/speciality: Robotics, Automation or Computer Science

• Language skills: Fluency in English (written and oral)

• Research experience (please review eligibility criteria): Experience in research in the robotic field and 5G technology will be positively considered, as well as scientific publications (knowledge of scientific writing).

• Other skills: High programming skills in C++, ROS, Python, basic knowledge of 5G and IoT. Good knowledge of software development environments such as Gitlab and software development in Linux.

Additional postgraduate courses related to the proposed research topic will be positively considered.

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