Research Project

ROCOTRANSP: Robot-human collaboration for goods transportation and delivery

Type

National Project

Start Date

01/06/2020

End Date

31/05/2023

Project Code

PID2019-106702RB-C21

Project illustration

Staff

Project Description

Project PID2019-106702RB-C21 funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033

The cities of the future will have to handle new social and economic challenges due to the increase of population (including a huge increase of ageing people), the need of reduction of pollution, the reduction of transportation costs and the design of urban spaces for the use of robots in the cities. The e-commerce has become one important factor in the transport of the last mile and is increasing everyday, and the cities should adequate their public and pedestrian spaces to these new scenarios where people and goods will have to be transported. In a near future, the robots will collaborate with humans in everyday tasks and for this they require more skills and functionalities. Moreover, the urban areas, the buildings and the private houses will have to be designed for the use of robots in everyday tasks.

The main objective of this project is to advance in the design of mobile robots with the capacity to transport and delivery goods to persons in urban areas, but with the emphasis in the collaboration between robots and humans. The navigation and the delivery of goods in urban areas present a number of challenges, which are still open problems, and we will investigate some of them in this project. The robots have to overcome complex navigation issues in diverse street situations, for example, streets semi-blocked due to street repairing, vehicles not well parked that do not allow to reach the delivery place, etc. In some cases pedestrians can help the robot to solve part of these problems, for example collaborating in the exploration of the area for finding the best path or rebuilding the map to include the new street barriers. The transportation of an object or goods side-by-side by a human and a robot or by two robots in urban areas is another very important issue. This transportation faces the problem of the joint transportation and at the same time the spatial geometric configuration of both (the human and the robot or the two robots) to pass in narrow spaces or in presence of people. The handover delivery of goods is another typical human-robot collaborative task. The robot can give an object and the human has to pick it or the human gives an object and the robot has to pick up it. This is a complex delivery that implies joint information of both actors to reach a successful delivery.

Another objective in this project is how the urban areas, the buildings and the houses have to be designed to allow the robots to move and share space with humans. We will investigate the main technologies and public space design that have to be considered for robots to move in urban spaces. A multidisciplinary team of architects and engineers will investigate this objective. In this project we will use the IRI labs, our IRI robots, the humanoids IVO (a double manipulator urban robot), Tibi, Dabo and a transportation robot. Moreover we will use the Barcelona Robot Lab infrastructure to do the validation and experimentation. This project will follow the previous research projects, Robo-In-Coop (DPI2013-42458-P), RoboTaskCoop (DPI2010-17112) and ColRobTransp (DPI2016-78957-R;AEI/FEDER EU), the project Consolider Ingenio 2012 MIPRCV (CSD2007-00018) and the European project URUS (FP6-IST- 045062) where the IP was the coordinator of the project.

Project Publications

Journal Publications

  • M. Dalmasso, J.E. Domínguez, I.J. Torres, P. Jiménez, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. Shared task representation for human–robot collaborative navigation: The collaborative search case. International Journal of Social Robotics, 16: 145-171, 2024.

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  • E. Repiso, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. Adaptive social planner to accompany people in real-life dynamic environments. International Journal of Social Robotics, 2023, to appear.

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  • C. Lemardelé, A. Baldó, A. Aniculaesei, A. Rausch, M. Conill, L. Everding, T. Vietor, T. Hegerhorst, R. Henze, L. Mátyus, L. Pagès, V. Roca, A. Sanfeliu, A. Santamaria-Navarro and I. Tóháti. The LogiSmile Project - Piloting Autonomous Vehicles for Last-Mile Logistics in European cities. Transportation Research Procedia, 71: 180-187, 2023.

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  • M. Peral, A. Sanfeliu and A. Garrell Zulueta. Efficient hand gesture recognition for human-robot interaction. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 7(4): 10272-10279, 2022.

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  • O. Gil, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. Social robot navigation tasks: Combining machine learning techniques and Social Force Model. Sensors, 21(7087): 23, 2021.

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Conference Publications

  • J.E. Domínguez, N.A. Rodríguez and A. Sanfeliu. Perception-intention-action cycle as a human acceptable way for improving human-robot collaborative tasks, 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2023, Stockholm, in Companion of the HRI'23, pp. 567-571.

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  • A.M. Puig-Pey, J.L. Zamora, B. Amante, J. Moreno, A. Garrell Zulueta, A. Grau, Y. Bolea, A. Santamaria-Navarro and A. Sanfeliu. Human acceptance in the human-robot interaction scenario for last-mile goods delivery, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts, 2023, Berlin, Germany, pp. 33-39.

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  • J.E. Domínguez and A. Sanfeliu. Improving human-robot interaction effectiveness in human-robot collaborative object transportation using force prediction, 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2023, Detroit, MI, USA, pp. 7839-7845.

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  • O. Castro, E. Repiso, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. Classification of humans social relations within urban areas, 5th Iberian Robotics Conference, 2022, Zaragoza, Spain, Vol 590 of Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, pp. 27-39, 2023.

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  • O. Gil and A. Sanfeliu. Robot navigation anticipative strategies in deep reinforcement motion planning, 5th Iberian Robotics Conference, 2022, Zaragoza, Spain, Vol 590 of Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, pp. 67-78, 2023.

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  • J. Laplaza, F. Moreno-Noguer and A. Sanfeliu. Context attention: Human motion prediction using context information and deep learning attention models, 5th Iberian Robotics Conference, 2022, Zaragoza, Spain, Vol 590 of Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, pp. 102-112, 2023.

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  • J. Laplaza, F. Moreno-Noguer and A. Sanfeliu. Context and intention aware 3D human body motion prediction using an attention deep learning model in handover tasks, 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022, Kyoto, pp. 4743-4748.

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  • J. Laplaza, N.A. Rodríguez, J.E. Domínguez, F. Herrero, S. Hernández, A. López, A. Sanfeliu and A. Garrell Zulueta. IVO Robot: A new social robot for Human-Robot collaboration, 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2022, Sapporo, Japan, pp. 860–864.

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  • A.M. Puig-Pey, A. Sanfeliu, C. Leroux, P. Dario, R. Rasso, B.C. Arrue, P. Soueres, F. Dailami, V. Vasco, M. Munih, A. Ijspeert and W. Roozing. A new methodological approach to analyze human roles in human-robot interaction scenarios, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts, 2022, Long Beach (CA), pp. 1-6, IEEE.

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  • J. Laplaza, A. Garrell Zulueta, F. Moreno-Noguer and A. Sanfeliu. Context and intention for 3D human motion prediction: Experimentation and user study in handover tasks, 31st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2022, Napoli, Italy, pp. 630-635.

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  • M. Dalmasso, A. Garrell Zulueta, J.E. Domínguez, P. Jiménez and A. Sanfeliu. Human-robot collaborative multi-agent path planning using Monte Carlo tree search and Social Reward Sources, 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2021, Xian, China, pp. 10133-10138.

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  • J.E. Domínguez, I.J. Torres, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. User-friendly smartphone interface to share knowledge in human-robot collaborative search tasks, 30th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2021, Vancouver, Canada, pp. 913-918.

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  • J. Laplaza, A. Pumarola, F. Moreno-Noguer and A. Sanfeliu. Attention deep learning based model for predicting the 3D human body pose using the robot human handover phases, 30th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2021, Vancouver, Canada, pp. 161-166.

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  • A. Sanfeliu, E. Repiso and A. Garrell Zulueta. Collaborative-AI: Social robots accompanying and approaching people, 1st International Workshop on New Foundations for Human-Centered AI, 2020, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Vol 2659 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pp. 33-37, 2020.

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