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Project | WALL-ET

Duration:
Warehouse Autonomous Lean Logistics Entity for Transportation

Warehouse Autonomous Lean Logistics Entity for Transportation

The goal of the German-Korean cooperation project WALL-ET is the development of a social transport robot, which can be used in Industrie 4.0 as well as in retail trade of the future. Through the scientific and technological cooperation with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology Europe (KIST-EU), the mobile robotic platform, provided by the Korean research partner KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery & Material), will be extended with corresponding software, so that social interaction and support in the cooperation between humans and robots will be possible. This enables the robot to support employees in a warehouse and customers in a supermarket or DIY store. The system will be equipped with collision avoidance mechanisms and a height-adjustable table for ergonomic loading and unloading. The system is able to derive a person's intention from sensor data and context data and to support the person in their work accordingly. In addition to employees in a warehouse, this can also include physically handicapped people in a supermarket. DFKI will develop solutions for human-machine communication that integrate speech, gestures and facial expressions in both input and output. This enables both customers and employees to interact with the robot and to collaborate effectively between humans and robots. Together with the Korean industry partner DONG-A P&T and the German trading company Globus, the entire system will be specified, deployed and tested on site.

Partners

Germany:

  • Korean Institute of Technology Europe, KIST Europe (Konsortialleitung)
  • Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI
  • Globus SB Warenhaus Holding

South Korea:

  • Korean Institute of Machinery & Materials KIMM
  • DONG-A Pencil Co.

Publications about the project

  1. WALL-ET: Assistance in Supermarkets and Warehouses through Social Cognitive Robots

    Sönke Knoch; Marco Hüster; Matthias Jost; Jonas Mohr; Dieter Merkel; Andreas Luxenburger; Tim Schwartz; Jeong-Jung Kim; Doo-Yeol Koh; Jinseong Park

    In: 2022 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR). IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR-2022), December 12-14, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Pages 219-220, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 12/2022.

Sponsors

BMBF - Federal Ministry of Education and Research

BMBF - Federal Ministry of Education and Research