I2R team is Top 5 finalist of the KUKA Innovation Challenge 2021

The I²R team CHRIS (comprising of researchers from Visual Intelligence and Robotics and Autonomous System departments) were selected as one of the five best concepts for the KUKA Innovation Award 2021: Artificial Intelligence Challenge.

The team CHRIS derived their name from their prototype “Collaborative Human-Robot Intelligent System (CHRIS) which was presented in the Finals held at the Hannover Messe 2021. Part of this work also received the “Best Demonstration Award” earlier this year at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021).

CHRIS is a solution that teaches new objects and tasks to a robot as one would do with a human counterpart. Relying on a suite of sensors, ranging from 3D cameras to tactile perception, as well as novel AI algorithms, the system can autonomously register new objects, understand new tasks from visual demonstration and reproduce them under non-fixed configurations.

Competing against 4 other teams from Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (Germany), Indian Institute of Science and the U.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Flanders Make@KU Leuven, and Chair for Individualized Production / RWTH Aachen University & Robots in Architecture Research (Germany), this is a great achievement for our Team CHRIS as we are the only Asian team that got to the Finals.

About KUKA Innovation Challenge
The competition aims to accelerate the pace of innovation in the field of robotic automation and improve technology transfer from research to industry. It is addressed to developers, graduates and research teams from universities or companies, who can submit their ideas on a task specified by KUKA. Each year, the focus is on a different technology.An international panel of expert judges selects the finalists from all submissions.