The JARVIS Team from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano won the KUKA Innovation Award 2023. The team was coordinated by Prof. Andrea Zanchettin from MeRLIn Lab and was made up of Niccolò Lucci, Isacco Zappa and Elias Montini, all three of them currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Information Technology.
The prize was awarded during the 2023 edition of automatica, the leading exhibition for smart automation and robotics that took place from June 27 to 30 in Munich, Germany.
The challenge consisted in implementing hardware and software extensions on a KUKA robot. More specifically, applicants were asked to use the availability of open interfaces in the newly introduced iiQKA robot operating system and to extend it by their own hardware and software components in order to deal with typical tasks in production much faster and easier.
In the spirit of the challenge, the JARVIS Team developed a complete plug-and-play method for programming collaborative robotic applications (e.g. assembly and packaging) that is fully integrated into the iiQKA ecosystem. This will facilitate their introduction in small and medium-sized enterprises. Together with the integration of artificial intelligence into the new iiQKA ecosystem, the concept enables unskilled operators to instruct the robot in a new task and to generalize in unknown situations, including new tasks and product variants.
See the JARVIS applications.