i-Botics in search for projects

About i-Botics
i-Botics is an open innovation centre for Research and Development in Interaction Robotics. The independent research centre has been founded by TNO and University of Twente and aims at developing knowledge and technology for value adding Robotic solutions. Knowledge is aggregated from various domains and researchers from our partners work together with us in the open innovation centre i-Botics. One of the research lines that has been carefully identified and selected as our primary focus is

Telerobotics.
Telerobotics is concerned with remote controlled robots, possibly semi-autonomous, in which telepresence and teleoperation is combined. Telerobotics can be applied in situations where human skills are required in a location that is either difficult to access or hazardous. In these situations, a telerobotics system can serve as an extension of a human operator to enable him/her to perform the complex task remotely.

Our approach is to provide the human operator with full perceptual and manipulation capabilities to intuitively perceive the remote environment and act as if being present at the remote site. A major advantage of this telerobotics approach is that it optimally benefits from combining the cognitive ability of the human operator with the robotic capabilities at a distance.
The ability to deploy a robotic system with manipulation capabilities as an extension of a human operator is an important asset in many situations where sending a human imposes an elevated risk due to hazardous circumstances.
Current state of technology
Telerobotics imposes big challenges, like the “situational awareness” of the human operator, “robotic sensing” and “adaptive automation” for partial autonomy. TNO and UT have gained extensive knowledge, expertise and technology to master these challenges. Our telerobotics technology has matured up to a point that we are able to effectively apply our modular telerobotics approach in situations where a good network connection can be facilitated.

What we are looking for
The general telerobotics framework that we have developed is ready to be combined with application dependent hardware – platforms and tools – to create telerobotics systems for specific scenarios. We are looking for enterprises that have an interest in deploying telerobotics technology and that want to invest and collaborate to develop our telerobotics technology further to fit their specific needs.

Interested? For more information contact Douwe Dresscher from UT Twente.