CAN in an anthropomorphic robot
- The Cora (cooperative robot assistant) robot
Source: CAN Newsletter September 2011
The Cora (cooperative robot assistant) robot has been developed at the Ruhr university in Bochum (Germany). It is a prototype of a service robot to assist a human partner in industrial assembly tasks. The robot – fixed on a table – is meant to interact with a human standing in front of him. The head with two degrees of freedom carries a camera system and microphones. The vision system performs tasks such as object recognition, gesture recognition and the estimation of the 3D position and orientation of objects. A second camera, mounted on the tabel next to the robot, is used to estimate the gaze direction of the human partner.
The robot uses individually servo-controlled motor units, which communicates to the PC host-controllers via CAN networks. The five PC host-controllers are interconnected via an Ethernet backbone network.
