Congratulation to our Rasmus Andersen for his Best Paper Award at ISR 2013 (International Symposium on Robotics) with his work “Calibration of Industrial Robots to Workstations using QR Codes”.
From the 19’th to the 27’th of October, four robotics researchers from M-tech went to Korea; Ole Madsen, Simon Boegh, Rasmus Andersen, and Casper Schou to participate in the conference “International Symposium on Robotics”. At the same time, another excursion to Korea was arranged in relation to a project aimed at investigating how small and mid sized companies in Korea do innovation and to learn from their approaches. Therefore, four researchers from Center for Industrial Production (CIP) also came to Korea, along with two camera people that should document their experiences and make it presentable to the general public.
A highlight for M-tech came at the conference. On the evening of the second day the conference dinner was planned, and at the entrance, Rasmus was kindly asked to find a place in front close to the scene – because his paper had actually won the main prize, “Best Paper at ISR 2013”! This was highly unexpected, but of course a very welcome and appreciated surprise for all the authors, the Robotics and Automation group, as well as the entire Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.
The paper is entitled “Calibration of Industrial Robots to Workstations using QR Codes”, and it concerned a particular calibration technique developed for the Little Helper robot at AAU. Little Helper is a so called AIMM – an Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulator. In short, it consists of an industrial robot arm placed on a mobile robotic platform. The vision behind it is, that industrial robots currently employed at factories are typically very good at producing one single products, but also very inflexible. Mobility has the potential to provide new ways to use robots when and where they are needed.
When a robot such as Little Helper moves on its own to a particular workstation to perform a task there, it is necessary for the robot to know exactly where it is in relation to the workstation. The paper proposed to do this by detecting a QR code, that has beforehand been placed statically at the workstation. The method has been tested both in the laboratory of M-tech as well as in a real industrial environment at Grundfos A/S in Bjerringbro.