Human-Guided Learning and Benchmarking of Robotic Heap Sorting (HEAP)

The HEAP project is a European consortium that investigates robotic sorting of unstructured heaps of unknown objects. Robotic heap sorting is of interest for many applications, such as nuclear decommissioning, recycling and manufacturing. Our team investigates novel robot manipulation and machine learning algorithms that can learn from human guidance and shared control. We aim at building an end-to-end benchmarking framework, which includes rigorous scientific methodology and experimental tools for application in realistic scenarios. Benchmark scenarios are being developed with off-the-shelf manipulators and grippers, allowing to create an affordable setup that can be easily reproduced both physically and in simulation.

Consortium: University of Nottingham, UK (coordinator), Technical University of Vienna Austria, IDIAP Research Institute Switzerland, INRIA Nancy – Grand Est Research Centre France, Italian Institute of Technology Italy

This work is funded by the ERA-NET CHIST-ERA and runs from 2019- 2023