Event

Robotics@Work Seminar: Lael Odhner, RightHand Robotics, Inc

Thursday, April 13, 2017
12:00 p.m.
2120 AV Williams
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Commercial opportunities for robotic grasping: where are we now?

Lael Odhner
Co-founder 
RightHand Robotics, Inc

Abstract
In this talk, we will explore the current state of the art in bin picking, that is, the autonomous unloading of individual parts stored jumbled in a box or bin. Bin picking has long been regarded as one of the defining problems in robotics and machine vision. However, commercial applications have hitherto been limited to highly structured special cases, such as the picking of individual parts whose shape and appearance are known beforehand with high accuracy.

A confluence of new factors has opened up new, commercially viable applications for bin picking. The explosive growth of e-commerce has generated a large demand for tedious manual labor that retailers cannot find workers to perform. At the same time, advances in low-cost machine vision, high-performance computation and passively adaptive robot hands have enabled a new generation of grasping systems capable of operating without models on a wide range of everyday consumer products. We will review these recent developments and discuss areas of opportunity for robotics researchers and future graduates.

RightHand Robotics is a Boston-based startup specializing in robotic manipulation. It is spun out of work performed for the DARPA Autonomous Robotic Manipulation program.

Additional seminars in this series are posted at:

http://www.robotics.umd.edu/content/roboticswork