(Press-News.org) ETRI research team has won a main prize at the German International Design Competition, one of the top three design award competitions in the world. This signifies global recognition of our research team’s technology.
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that its Teach Pendant software for the autonomous mobile collaborative robot (MOBY1)) won the main prize in the User Experience (UX2)) category at the ‘iF Design Award 20243)’, an international design competition in Germany.
1) MOBY: Equipped with the AI-based vision solution ‘IndyEye’ and the collaborative robot ‘Indy’. It’s a total robot platform that integrates autonomous mobility and manipulability.
2) UX (User Experience): refers to the comprehensive experience that a user feels and thinks while directly or indirectly using a product, system, or service.
3) International Forum Design Award 2024
ETRI, in collaboration with Neuromeka and the research team of Professor Seung-Heon Yoo from the Department of Art and Design at Korea University, has been recognized for its proficiency in the UX category with the ‘MOBY SW’, a teach pendant4) for a manipulator5) based on mobile robots.
4) Teach Pendant: A device used with industrial equipment or robots, including collaborative robots. It is designed for user convenience in industrial settings where monitors and mouse are not usable, and in automated equipment that doesn’t require special operations. It typically features only key buttons and an LCD in a compact form.
5) Manipulator: A mechanical device that provides movements similar to those of a human arm.
The award-winning work is the Teach Pendant application, a user interface software for autonomous mobile manipulators. This app has been highly praised for its user-friendly and intuitive design.
ETRI was responsible for the entire UX design and development of the Teach Pendant (MOBY app). Korea University took charge of the UX/UI design for the Teach Pendant app of the mobile manipulator, while Neuromeka developed the hardware and framework for the mobile manipulator.
A mobile manipulator refers to a combination of a wheeled mobile robot capable of moving around and a robotic arm designed for performing tasks. It describes a robot that is simultaneously controlled to carry out movement and manipulation operations.
The MOBY SW has significantly improved upon the inconvenience users faced with traditional teach pendant products, which required separate instructions6) for the mobile robot and the manipulator. It now allows for the movement and operation of both the mobile robot and the manipulator to be instructed simultaneously within a single software.
6) Instruction: The technique of humans conveying commands to robots, teaching new tasks, or performing possible operations.
ETRI researchers have explained that with the developed teach pendant, it is now possible to simultaneously set destinations and paths for the autonomous navigation of mobile robots, as well as instruct manipulators for object manipulation tasks, significantly enhancing user convenience.
In particular, there has been no teach pendant capable of integrating and simultaneously utilizing both mobile robots and manipulators among existing products. This makes the award even more meaningful as it represents the first development of a teach pendant for mobile manipulators in Korea.
The teach pendant developed by the researchers has been designed to enable the creation of maps and routes for the autonomous navigation of mobile robots, driving programs, simulations, and work programs for manipulators. This development is expected to effectively simplify the complex processes involved in automation implementation in the future.
Due to its specialized user-friendly interface and the provision of programs based on the Behavior Tree (BT) approach, even individuals not familiar with programming can easily program tasks for robots.
ETRI received recognition for the excellence of its teach pendant through a user study conducted with general users at Keimyung University’s Usability Evaluation Research Center, focusing on the robot’s Pick and Place tasks of moving and arranging objects at specific locations. It has been validated for its usability, proving that even non-experts can easily handle it without coding.
According to a report by the global market research firm IDTechEx, the mobile robot market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 18.9% over the next 20 years, reaching a size of 1,500 billion dollars (190 trillion) by 2044. The developed teach pendant is expected to be applicable in various sectors, including small to medium-sized manufacturing companies, as well as in the food and beverage, logistics, warehouse, market, and museum service areas.
In the automation industry, experts well-versed in vision, collaborative robots, and mobile robots are rare. The researchers believe that using the developed teach pendant can lower the entry barriers to these three robotic elements simultaneously, thereby securing a wider user base.
Dr. Jeyoun Dong from the ETRI Robotics & Mobility Research Secetion stated, “As robots are expanding into various fields, we hope that the user-friendly teach pendant will serve as a foundation for not only robot experts but also the general public to easily use robots.”
Professor Seung-Heon Yoo from the Department of Design at Korea University also emphasized the importance of integrative UX design research, stating, “Robots are quintessentially technology-intensive products that must also reflect the value of user-centered UX design. The approach that ETRI and Neuromeka have actively agreed upon and achieved together highlights this.”
ETRI has decided to transfer this technology to companies specializing in collaborative and mobile robots, moving towards full commercialization. Furthermore, ETRI plans to focus on enhancing features such as the mobile robot-generated maps within the app for the convenience of users.
The iF Design Award, hosted by the International Forum Design in Germany, is one of the world’s most prestigious design competitions. Along with Germany’s ‘Red Dot Design Award’ and the United States ‘IDEA’, it is considered one of the top three global design awards. It recognizes winners in nine categories: Product, Packaging, Communication, Concept, Interior Architecture, Service Design, User Experience (UX), and User Interface (UI).
###
About Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
ETRI is a non-profit government-funded research institute. Since its foundation in 1976, ETRI, a global ICT research institute, has been making its immense effort to provide Korea a remarkable growth in the field of ICT industry. ETRI delivers Korea as one of the top ICT nations in the World, by unceasingly developing world’s first and best technologies.
END
ETRI wins ‘iF Design Award’ for mobile collaborative robot
A remarkable achievement recognized by the design world in the UX category of one of the top three design awards globally. Developed MOBY Teach Pendant, making it easy for people to teach robots
2024-05-27
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Combating carbon footprint: novel reactor system converts carbon dioxide into usable fuel
2024-05-27
Reducing carbon emissions from small-scale combustion systems, such as boilers and other industrial equipment, is a key step towards building a more sustainable, carbon-neutral future. Boilers are widely used across various industries for essential processes like heating, steam generation, and power production, making them significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
Boilers are generally quite efficient. As a result, it is difficult to reduce CO2 emissions simply by improving the combustion efficiency. Therefore, researchers are exploring alternative approaches to mitigating the environmental ...
Investigating the origin of circatidal rhythms in freshwater snails
2024-05-27
Organisms, including humans, follow a schedule that coordinates important bodily functions such as sleep-wake cycles, metabolism, hormone production, cognitive function, and feeding habits to environmental cycles. While most organisms possess circadian rhythms synchronized with the 24-hour day-night cycle, they have also developed other internal clocks to suit their local environments. Marine animals have evolved circatidal rhythms, aligning activities with the 12.4-hour tidal cycle, complementing circadian rhythms.
Researchers from Chiba University have discovered that snails living in downstream tidal areas have biological ...
Altering cellular interactions around amyloid plaques may offer novel Alzheimer’s treatment strategies
2024-05-27
New York City, [May 27, 2024] – Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have made a significant breakthrough in Alzheimer’s disease research by identifying a novel way to potentially slow down or even halt disease progression. The study, which focuses on the role of reactive astrocytes and the plexin-B1 protein in Alzheimer's pathophysiology, provides crucial insights into brain cell communication and opens the door to innovative treatment strategies. It was published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI 10.1038/s41593-024-01664-w) on May 27.
This groundbreaking work is centered ...
Brain damage reveals part of the brain necessary for helping others
2024-05-27
Our willingness to help others is governed by a specific brain region pinpointed by researchers in a study of patients with brain damage to that region.
Learning about where in the brain ‘helping’ decisions are made is important for understanding how people might be motivated to tackle large global challenges, such as climate change, infectious disease and international conflict. It is also essential for finding new approaches to treating disorders of social interactions.
The study, ...
Surprising properties of elastic turbulence discovered
2024-05-27
Blood, lymph fluid and other biological liquids can have surprising and sometimes troubling properties. Many of these biological solutions are non-Newtonian fluids, a type of liquid that is characterized by a non-linear relationship between stress and strain. Consequently, non-Newtonian fluids don’t necessarily behave as one would expect from a liquid. For example, some of these peculiar fluids deform when touched lightly but will act almost as a solid when a strong force is applied.
And biological ...
Study assesses cancer-related care at US hospitals predominantly serving minority populations compared with non-minority serving hospitals
2024-05-27
It’s important to ensure that care provided at US hospitals that predominantly serve Black and Hispanic populations is as high-quality as the care provided at other US hospitals. New research reveals significant disparities in the delivery of cancer-related care at minority serving hospitals (MSHs) compared with non-MSHs, however. The findings are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
For the study, investigators analyzed information from the National Cancer Database (which accrues approximately 70% of US cancer diagnoses) to identify patients eligible for definitive ...
First in-human investigator-initiated clinical trial to launch for refractory prostate cancer patients: Novel alpha therapy targets prostate-specific membrane antigen
2024-05-27
Osaka, Japan - A research team at Osaka University will start an investigator-initiated clinical trial for refractory prostate cancer patients after successful development of a new alpha-ray therapeutic agent ([At-211] PSMA-5) and confirmation of its efficacy in animal models. This will be a world-first in-human clinical trial with [At-211] PSMA-5.
Prostate cancer is on the rise worldwide and is the most commonly diagnosed new cancer in men in Japan. Various treatments are offered for prostate cancer, but the prognosis is very poor when the disease is resistant to standard treatment and associated with multiple metastases.
In ...
Will generative AI change the way universities communicate?
2024-05-27
Since the launch of ChatGPT 3 in November 2022, we've been abuzz with talk of artificial intelligence: is it an unprecedented opportunity, or will it rob everyone of jobs and creativity? As we debate on social media (and perhaps use ChatGPT almost daily), generative AIs have also entered the arena of university communication. These tools—based on “Large Language Models” that were optimized for interactive communication—can indeed support, expand, and innovate university communication ...
Artificial Intelligence could help cure loneliness, says expert
2024-05-27
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology could offer companionship to lonely people amid an international epidemic of loneliness, says a robotics expert.
Tony Prescott, a professor of cognitive robotics at the University of Sheffield, argues in his new book The Psychology of Artificial Intelligence that ‘relationships with AIs could support people’ with forms of social interaction..
Loneliness has been found to seriously impair human health, and Professor Prescott makes a case that advances in AI technology could ...
Echidnapus identified from an ‘Age of Monotremes’
2024-05-26
Published today in the Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, evidence of an ‘Age of Monotremes’ has been unearthed by a team of Australian scientists at the Australian Museum (AM), Museums Victoria and Australian Opal Centre.
The findings were led by two renowned mammalogists, Honorary Associate of the Australian Museum, Professor Tim Flannery; and Professor Kris Helgen, Chief Scientist and Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute (AMRI).
Found in the Lightning Ridge opal fields, NSW, the opalised jaws ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Intracortical neural interfaces: Advancing technologies for freely moving animals
Post-LLM era: New horizons for AI with knowledge, collaboration, and co-evolution
“Sloshing” from celestial collisions solves mystery of how galactic clusters stay hot
Children poisoned by the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has risen in the U.S. – eight years of national data shows
USC researchers observe mice may have a form of first aid
VUMC to develop AI technology for therapeutic antibody discovery
Unlocking the hidden proteome: The role of coding circular RNA in cancer
Advancing lung cancer treatment: Understanding the differences between LUAD and LUSC
Study reveals widening heart disease disparities in the US
The role of ubiquitination in cancer stem cell regulation
New insights into LSD1: a key regulator in disease pathogenesis
Vanderbilt lung transplant establishes new record
Revolutionizing cancer treatment: targeting EZH2 for a new era of precision medicine
Metasurface technology offers a compact way to generate multiphoton entanglement
Effort seeks to increase cancer-gene testing in primary care
Acoustofluidics-based method facilitates intracellular nanoparticle delivery
Sulfur bacteria team up to break down organic substances in the seabed
Stretching spider silk makes it stronger
Earth's orbital rhythms link timing of giant eruptions and climate change
Ammonia build-up kills liver cells but can be prevented using existing drug
New technical guidelines pave the way for widespread adoption of methane-reducing feed additives in dairy and livestock
Eradivir announces Phase 2 human challenge study of EV25 in healthy adults infected with influenza
New study finds that tooth size in Otaria byronia reflects historical shifts in population abundance
nTIDE March 2025 Jobs Report: Employment rate for people with disabilities holds steady at new plateau, despite February dip
Breakthrough cardiac regeneration research offers hope for the treatment of ischemic heart failure
Fluoride in drinking water is associated with impaired childhood cognition
New composite structure boosts polypropylene’s low-temperature toughness
While most Americans strongly support civics education in schools, partisan divide on DEI policies and free speech on college campuses remains
Revolutionizing surface science: Visualization of local dielectric properties of surfaces
LearningEMS: A new framework for electric vehicle energy management
[Press-News.org] ETRI wins ‘iF Design Award’ for mobile collaborative robotA remarkable achievement recognized by the design world in the UX category of one of the top three design awards globally. Developed MOBY Teach Pendant, making it easy for people to teach robots