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HapticGiant - The New Haptic Interface for Teleoperation and Simulation · Nov 7, 2024

A prototype has been completed at KIT-ISAS that offers a unique, immersive user experience for teleoperation. The interface, for instance, can convey resistance and motion, providing tactile feedback as users engage with remote or virtual objects.

Heavy construction machinery and robots that autonomously map the environment, pick up and transport objects: The ROBDEKON competence center presented its autonomous decontamination robotics technologies to an interested professional audience on October 23 and 24. Around 50 experts from the energy industry and companies working on the remediation of contaminated sites were able to experience the robots in live demonstrations, control them themselves and find out about the advanced state of development. This year, the industry meeting took place at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen.

One of the project goals of the ROBDEKON competence center is to further develop multi-robot mapping. This technology should make it possible to generate collaborative maps of the potential operating environment using the heterogeneous systems used in a scenario. The resulting information should also be made usable for other target systems, such as other vehicles or robots. The robot systems are tested in various scenarios in the LivingLab in Ilmenau.

The third participatory event of the ROBDEKON competence center takes place from 23.10.2024 to 24.10.2024. Join us for informative talks and practical demonstrations by experts from science and industry. This time we welcome you in Bremen.

GammaBot has completed test runs on the site of the Mülheim-Kärlich nuclear power plant: The robot from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (HKA) autonomously explored a test room. The practical test was carried out together with the Institute of Technology and Management in Construction at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT-TMB) and Kraftanlagen Heidelberg (KAH).

The Chair of High-Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed a processing pipeline in ROBDEKON that opens up a wide range of mobile manipulation options for robots - even in unknown environments and independent of the specific robot type. The pipeline, described in detail in the paper MAkEable: Memory-centered and Affordance-based Task Execution Framework for Transferable Mobile Manipulation Skills, represents a significant advance in the field of robotic manipulation and offers a versatile and adaptable solution that can cope with the complexities of real-world environments.

Robot-assisted decontamination technologies presented in a talk and live exhibit: At the first conference for »AI-based robotics« (KIRO2024) organized by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) in Berlin, ROBDEKON presented the status of its developments.

Learning from successful grasping actions

In his talk, ROBDEKON spokesperson and Fraunhofer IOSB institute director Prof. Jürgen Beyerer provided an insight into the technologies and platforms that the competence center is researching. The aim is to use artificial intelligence to enable robots to independently master complex tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments, in order to reduce the burden on humans and keep them out of danger zones. The robots learn by themselves to store and improve successful grasping actions. Built-in AI algorithms help with the perception of the surroundings and the visual recognition of hazardous objects.

Live exhibit: salvaging barrels at a distance of 500 km

In addition to the talk, conference participants in Berlin experienced the autonomous excavator ALICE (Autonomous Large Intelligent Crawler Excavator) as a live exhibit: In the accompanying exhibition, visitors could use a laptop to instruct the excavator to recover barrels. ALICE itself was located 500 kilometers away in Karlsruhe and carried out the requested maneuvers independently, which the participants could again follow live via video link.

The aim of the conference was to bring together robotics experts from business and science in order to secure the long-term competitiveness and sovereignty of Germany and Europe in the field of AI-based robotics.

Bundled robotics expertise in the new Robotics Institute

The conference also marked the launch of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), which brings together Germany's leading institutions in the field of robotics research and creates a central point of contact. The competence network, which is managed by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), will drive forward cutting-edge research, talent development and innovation in Germany in the field of AI-based robotics and will receive funding of 20 million euros from the BMBF for four years.

Prof. Angela Schoellig from TUM (left), Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (center) with Prof. Tamim Asfour from KIT at the presentation of the RIG in Berlin. Also present: the humanoid robot ARMAR-7 from KIT. © BMBF/Hans-Joachim Rickel

The spokesperson for the RIG is Professor Tamim Asfour, who has been involved in ROBDEKON from the very beginning. He holds the Chair of High-Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He describes the objective of the new virtual institute as follows: »We will establish the RIG as a nationally recognized and internationally unique institute that designs cutting-edge research, education and innovation in AI-based robotics and aligns it with the needs of Germany.« Fraunhofer IOSB, as the lead partner of ROBDEKON, is also part of RIG and will link the laboratory for autonomous construction machines, which was built in ROBDEKON under the direction of Dr.-Ing. Janko Petereit, with other infrastructures and expand it into a laboratory for large-scale robotics.

From June 11 to 13, 2024, operators, manufacturers, suppliers, authorities and organizations from research and academia will meet again at the trade fair in Leipzig to discuss the latest developments and research results in the field of nuclear technology. ROBDEKON will be there with a booth and will show the current state of development of robotic systems.

Visitors to the BMBF Innovation Forum »Civil Security« in Berlin on May 7 and 8 were able to experience an autonomous excavator, a milling robot for the dismantling of nuclear facilities and other state-of-the-art technologies. The excavator and milling robot are the result of the BMBF-funded ROBDEKON Competence Center for »Robotic Systems for Decontamination in Hazardous Environments«.

In a joint measurement campaign, the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB and ZECH Umwelt tested the ALICE autonomous excavator developed at the ROBDEKON competence center in a quarry. The challenging environment with its different properties of the soil and excavated material provided an ideal setting for testing the autonomous excavator. This allowed valuable findings to be gathered in order to evaluate the system's robustness in real operating conditions.

As part of a demonstration, scientists from Fraunhofer IOSB-AST were able to successfully teleoperate the autonomous mobile transport system "MATS", a modified PALFINGER forklift, over a distance of 260 kilometers (Ilmenau – Karlsruhe). A local 5G network was used along with special automation technologies to process and evaluate the numerous sensor data. Future fields of application include the remote control of mobile machinery in a wide variety of scenarios.

Now on LinkedIn · Nov 29, 2023

The Competence Center can now also be found on LinkedIn.

Decontamination robotics hands-on · Oct 24, 2023 · Press Release

The Competence Center ROBDEKON opened its doors in Karlsruhe to an interested audience of experts and presented the current state of research in the field of decontamination robotics. Around 80 participants, including high-ranking representatives of the energy industry and companies working on the remediation of contaminated sites, were able to actively familiarize themselves with the (semi-)autonomous robot systems in live demonstrations on October 18 and 19, 2023, and discuss solutions with the ROBDEKON partners. In the coming period, the technologies developed in the BMBF-funded competence center will be tested in real environments and made fit for practical use.

From October 18th to October 19th, 2023, the second participation event of the ROBDEKON Competence Center will take place in Karlsruhe, featuring hands-on demonstrations and talks from academia and practice.

The KERNTec Scientific Days, a newly introduced platform for scientific exchange in nuclear technology, took place from June 13-15, 2023 in Frankfurt am Main. ROBDEKON was there.

Robots should remediate contaminated sites as autonomously as possible and support the dismantling of nuclear facilities as well as the recovery of hazardous materials: This is the objective of ROBDEKON, a competence center funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
After four years of defining detailed use cases, researching technological principles, and developing demonstrators, the focus in phase II is now on transferring the results into practice and making the center permanent.
Therefore, ROBDEKON is looking for partners for pilot projects – i. e. companies that want to offer and/or use autonomous decontamination technology.

Robots should perform decontamination tasks as independently as possible in environments that are hostile to humans, e.g. in the remediation of contaminated sites or in the dismantling of nuclear facilities and the decontamination of power plant components – with the aim of allowing humans to stay out of the danger zone. This vision was at the beginning of ROBDEKON. Now, the first, four-year funding phase of the competence center has been completed and various systems waiting for their evaluation in the field have been developed. These systems are able to measure contamination, handle hazardous substances, or autonomously remove contaminated layers of soil.

From 21.06.2022 to 22.06.2022 the KERNTECHNIK 2022 took place in Leipzig. The team of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sascha Gentes from the professorship Dismantling of Conventional and Nuclear Structures at the Institute of Technology and Management in Construction of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was represented with several presentations.

On Monday, June 13th 2022, from 9am to 4:45pm, the Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Robots for Hazardous Decommissioning Tasks is held in the context of the 17th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-17) in Zagreb, Croatia. Deploying mobile robots in hazardous environments is a difficult task that involves not only high costs but also health and environmental risks. Modern, intelligent robots can support the decommissioning and reduce many hazards for humans.

ROBDEKON is participating with a booth at the BMBF Innovation Forum »Civil Security« 2022 and discusses novel concepts for robot-based decontamination with experts.

Yet another member joins the robot family in the Fraunhofer IOSB lab: Boston Dynamics’ Robot dog Spot has been equipped to support the decontamination tasks in ROBDEKON with advanced exploration capabilities.

On Tuesday, September 28th 2021, from 2pm - 6:15pm, the 1st Workshop on Scene Understanding in Unstructured Environments is held in the context of the DAGM German Conference on Pattern Recognition. Scene understanding in unstructured environments is a key element in ROBDEKON.

In 2018, the ROBDEKON competence center (robotic systems for decontamination in hazardous environments) started operations. After three years of work, a regular review was due - on this occasion, the ROBDEKON partners in Karlsruhe and Bremen presented the state of their developed technology and gave live demonstrations of the teleoperated, semi-autonomous and autonomous systems they are researching.

The FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik has released »VDB Mapping«, a high-performance probabilistic 3D mapping framework that generates volumetric environment maps in real-time from lidar data.

KIT releases the newly developed app »iviz« for visualization and teleoperation of robots using virtual and augmented reality.

First participatory event · Sep 30, 2019

From 22.10.2019 to 23.10.2019 the first participatory event of the ROBDEKON Competence Center will take place in Karlsruhe. The event has the character of a conference and will feature talks by experts in the field of decontamination and robotics. The talks will be given both by users from the field and by members of the ROBDEKON consortium.

When chemically contaminated sites or old landfills are remediated, toxic waste is sorted or nuclear facilities are dismantled, people work in environments that are hazardous to their health: they handle pollutants, there is a risk of fire or explosion, or the level of radioactive radiation is increased. This makes complex and often stressful protective measures necessary. This could be remedied by robots and autonomous machines that can carry out the work without an operator nearby. There is now a central point of contact for researching and testing the technologies required for this purpose: on 25 June, the »ROBDEKON Competence Center - Robots for Decontamination in Hazardous Environments«, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), was opened in Karlsruhe.

Announcement: Ceremonial Opening · Jan 30, 2019

Around a year after work began on setting up the ROBDEKON Competence Center (»Robotic systems for decontamination in hazardous environments«), a ceremonial opening event will be held on June 25, 2019, at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Karlsruhe.

Launch of the competence center »ROBDEKON« · Jul 25, 2018 · Press Release

If chemically contaminated sites have to be remediated or nuclear facilities have to be dismantled, workers are exposed to considerable health risks despite all precautions and protective equipment. In the future, robotic systems are to carry out such decontamination work so that people can stay away from the danger zone. The new »ROBDEKON Competence Center«, which is being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research with twelve million euros, is working to make this vision a reality.