KUKA is a leading robotics company from Germany with sales exceeding 1 billion Euros introducing innovative products to the industrial robotics market frequently. In 2013, KUKA announced a competition for allowing technology transfer from research institutions to the industry in the emerging field of mobile manipulation. Our entry for this competition “Inertial Motion Capture based Teleoperation of a Mobile Manipulator with Multigrasp End Effector” was selected as one of the four finalists for the KUKA Innovation Award from an initial application pool of 30 teams coming from renowned universities of the world. The other finalists were teams from the University of Zurich, Politecnico di Milano and Niedersächsische Technische Hochschule.

Nazarbayev University team consisting of team leader, Dr. Atakan Varol, and researchers Yerbolat Khassanov and Iliyas Tursynbek traveled to Germany to participate in the finals. Firstly, the work was presented to the KUKA managers, researchers and workers at the KUKA headquarters in Augsburg (Germany). Then the team continued the presentation of the project to the visitors of the Automatica 6th International Trade Fair for Automation and Mechatronics. The project attracted great interest from the visitors and was highly praised by the KUKA researchers. During Automatica 2014, NU team developed valuable connections for future collaborations and many research groups expressed their interest to buy the NU Multigrasp Hand. NU Multigrasp Hand is currently a research prototype being developed under the Kazakhstan Technology Commercialization Project.

For more information regarding the project, please visit our research page.