Internships: Service robotics at home

We are looking for two interns, in order to complete our robocup team !

Main goal:

Enhance our robot PALbator (OPL) with one of those 2 features :

• New Human-Robot Interaction (Natural Language + Tablet)
• New objects grasping (Update robot arm mechanics and controller + new grasping manager software)

Implement those features in robocup scenario. Rules available here : https://robocupathome.github.io/RuleBook/rulebook/master.pdf

Why is it great ?

You will participate to the biggest robotic competition with:

• 3 500 participants
• 5 000 robots
• 45 represented countries
• 70 000 spectators

The team already earned a good reputation:

• 2nd rank in 2021 at Robocup@Home SSPL in simulated edition (covid)
• 6th rank in 2021 at Robocup@Home OPL in simulated edition (covid)
• 3rd rank in 2019 at Robocup@Home SSPL
• Best scientific paper in 2019 at RCS

You will compete with/against world top-level teams, work at the edge of the robotic state of the art, drastically enhance your skills, and in the same time you will not really know if you are playing or working!

When? Where? How (much)?

The internship should start between the 23rd of January and the 1st of Febrary, for 6 month. It should end before the 29th of July.

The internship will be done in CPE Lyon, Villeurbanne, France. The 4th to the 10th of July, we whole team will be at the competition in Bordeaux.

You will work officially 35 hours per week and be payed 3,90 per hour. You will also receive one “Ticket Restaurant” (8,5€) per working day. Half of the amount is offered by CPE. The other half is withdraw from your salary.

Internship topic details

Internship 1 : Human-robot interface for robocup scenarios

Profile : You are a Last year engineer student in robotics / computer science – Skills with ROS, Javascript, Python

Topic : A service Robot at home must understand and answer with the human standards. Our Pepper robot has a great vocal and tablet interaction with some proprietary technologies. However, our PALbator robot interaction system is getting old and doesn’t work very well. Your mission will be to find and integrate a new, modern, robust, and if possible open source solution to our robot, matching with the needs of a robocup scenario. Here is the summary of your tasks :

• Implement a modern natural language interface: STT, TTS, NLU, …
• Natural language interaction should be « mirrored » on the robot’s tablet (Javascript, Python)
• Collaborate to the robot scenarios

Internship 2 : Objects Grasping

Profile : You are a last year engineer student in robotics / computer science – Skills with ROS, Python, Embedded electronics, C language, 3D printing

Topic : Our PALbator robot has a custom 7 DoF arm. 1 DoF is prismatic joint working as a lifter to move the rest of the arm from the base to the top of the robot. It had been working… but it’s better for the future to implement a new controller more robust. The 6 rotoïd DoF are working well… but with quite a big gear backlash. This has to be improved. Also, the global software architecture to grasp object can be significantly improved and needs to be re-developed. Your mission in a few points :

• Mechanics : 20% - Embedded : 20% - Software : 60%
• Adapt VESC controller to drive a prismatic joint (Embedded)
• Enhance arm capabilities (Mechanics)
• Rewrite the whole arm management to perform all the possible grasping in the robocup scenarios

Apply

Send your application at raphael DOT leber AT cpe DOT fr