KIT's ARMAR-6 Humanoid Will Help Humans Fix Other Robots

While it may be a bit premature to expect collaborative humanoid robots to be doing anything useful in a warehouse environment, the only way we're going to make it happen is by encouraging the difficult transition between research labs and industry. The European Union is doing a pretty good job of providing support for things like this through its Horizon 2020 program, and one of the projects it's supporting is called SecondHands, intended to "design a robot that can offer help to a maintenance technician in a pro-active manner… as a second pair of hands that can assist the technician when he/she is in need of help." SecondHands is a collaboration between Ocado (a U.K. company that operates highly automated warehouses), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (which has a bunch of experience building capable humanoid robots), and other research institutions including EPFL, UCL, and Sapienza University of Rome. Together, they're using the first prototype of the SecondHands collaborative robot, which also happens to be the sixth version of ARMAR, and one that's ready (we hope) to do something practical. ARMAR was created by Professor Tamim Asfour and his team at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H²T) at KIT's Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics.