Project Overview.

Project Overview

The CEM-DFKI project will create a robotic agent for an online collaboration which will find and move pieces in a automated factory domain. The overall project from which it will be serving is called SemProm and it involves several partners in Germany and Switzerland.

For this project, DFKI Bremen is in charge of creating the robot platform. The main goal is to have a robot platform that will manipulate and redirect manufactured pieces or packages along a smart factory environment.

The robot platform has to be constructed in three main stages:

1. Object manipulation with dual arms.
2. Robot navigation in an dynamic indoor environment.
3. Collaborative robot navigation and planning.

In this moment, the DFKI team is in charge of developing the manipulation elements of the robot. Specifically, the DFKI-SemProm is developing two arms and one head with all the necessary sensors and actuators for recognizing and manipulating small production pieces.

The proposed robot is conformed by a double arm manipulation, a gripper and a robot head for mainting most of the robot visual sensors. As it can be seen in the following images, the robot still has a static position but with the possibility of manipulating small pieces that are continously moving infront of it.

Our SemProm robot, now is able to manipulate a small piece that is moving along a sliding band from a Smart Factory-DFKI module. It is also receiving information from a visual servoing system that is located in its left arm and from a stereo camera that emulates two eyes.

Additionally the robot has a Swiss Ranger camera that generates images 3D perception in a range of 7 m. Basically, this images obtains an image of 176x144 pixels tht represent a sets of 3D point clouds.


The robot is meant to act in a cooperative environment as a tool for a flexible manufacturing process. The manufacture process involves reading and writing of Siemmens RFID chip that stores both product and process information. Therefore, SemProm project is developing a system and methodology for making a more flexible and efficient form of manufacturing products and services by implanting relevant information into a RFID chip.

The robot collaboration will become valuable and important whenever groups of robots will need to exchange valuable information about products and processes. The robot seen as an agent will effectively develop a more adaptable machine. Specifically, it will continuously relate with its environment and create a new form of human-robot relationships.