Autonomous gripping systems
Schunk pushes the use of artificial intelligence
Schunk announced its cooperation with AI specialist AnotherBrain at the Hannover Messe 2019. By the beginning of 2020, the partners want to develop the first autonomous gripping system that enables independent handling without manual programming.
"With this collaboration, we want to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence in handling and assembly and enable new handling scenarios in the smart factory as well as in service robotics," said Henrik Schunk, Managing Partner and CEO, at the signing of the contract.
Where previously every single step was laboriously programmed, the gripper manufacturer's goal is for tomorrow's handling solutions to act much more independently. Instead of defining positions, speeds and gripping forces step by step, autonomous gripping systems will detect their target objects via cameras, take over the gripping planning independently and refine it further and further. Using appropriate sensors in the gripper fingers, the motor current and intelligence integrated into the gripper hand, the quality of a grip can be recorded and evaluated so that adjustments can be made if necessary.
" Schunk 's collaboration with AnotherBrain will accelerate progress in autonomous handling enormously," Henrik Schunk is convinced. The Paris-based AI think tank AnotherBrain has excellent expertise in realizing autonomous gripping scenarios. Its founder and CEO, robotics pioneer Bruno Maisonnier, founded Aldebaran Robotics in 2005 and launched the humanoid robot Nao on the market in 2008. In contrast to previously established deep learning, in which a large amount of data is generated and evaluated at great expense, AnotherBrain pursues a novel approach to machine learning with its bionically inspired concept - 'Organic AI'. Independent of clouds and networks and with minimal energy and storage requirements, the aim is to enable gripping systems to act autonomously using technology inspired by the human brain.
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