AILA

The robot AILA is a mobile dual-arm robot system developed as a research platform for investigating aspects of the multidisciplinary area of mobile manipulation. Mobility, perception, manipulation and, primarily, the use of all these subareas within a single system that is able to perceive and understand its environment, move around, manipulate, learn about objects and deal with unstructured and uncertain environments is the goal of this research area.

AILA has 32 degrees of freedom, including 7-DOF arms, 4-DOF torso, 2-DOF head, and a mobile base equipped with six wheels, each of them with two degrees of freedom. The primary design goal was to achieve a lightweight arm construction with a payload-to-weight ratio greater than one. Besides, an adjustable body should sustain the dual-arm system providing an extended workspace. Mobility is currently provided by means of a wheel-based mobile base. Its hardware includes:

• Two Prosilica GC780C cameras that create a stereo system unit in the head
• A periodically-tilting short-ranged Hokuyo URG Laser scanner in the chest and a Mesa SR-4000 3D Time of Flight (TOF) camera in the robot’s belly
• Two long-ranging Hokuyo UTM Laser scanners provide a circumferential view for the mobile base
• Two 3,5-inches embedded PCs: one for motion control located in the head and one for navigation located in the mobile base
• A mini-ITX board in combination with a dedicated graphics card for vision processing is located in the torso
• The communication network consists of five independent CAN lines for controlling the two arms, the torso, and the wheel modules of the base.
• GigaEthernet routed through two fiveport switches connect the head cameras, the three computers, and the outside world.
• Two six-axis force/torque sensors at the robot’s wrists.
• In-house developed joint electronics consisting of a stack of three PCBs (power electronics, FPGA, interfaces and sensors)