Mobile Platform : Integration of KUKAs LWR 4+ on Little Helper [Video]

In order to make manufacturing industries more and more flexible, a lot of research is being done on mobile robots. You may already have heard about “Little Helper”, a research project at Aalborg University, Denmark. The concept of this mobile robot is to integrate mobility, vision, a robot manipulator and tooling into one complete, autonomous and flexible system.

This robot should be able to move through the shop and do different tasks, therefore eliminating monotonous and repetitive tasks for human workers. One important fact about this project was that all its parts had to be off-the-shelf components.

Little Helper is a mobile robot that must be able to accomplish various tasks such as :

• Transportation

• Pick-and-place

• Quality control

• Dangerous tasks

It should be able to communicate with other machines. For example, a CNC (computer numerical control) machine would call it (because it had finished its job) then Little Helper would arrive, change …