Bristol team develop intelligent handheld robots

Handheld tools usually lack understanding about the task they are performing. Dr Walterio Mayol-Cuevas and PhD student Austin Gregg-Smith, from Bristol University’s Department of Computer Science, have been working on robot prototypes and how best to interact with a tool that ‘knows and acts’.

“For now we program the tasks manually as we are currently still exploring the way in which users who are already very capable and intelligent will interact and cooperate with a tool that has motion and also a degree of task knowledge,” Mayol-Cuevas told The Engineer via email.

“This is because users using our robots have essentially never experienced such shared cognition and actuation with a handheld tool before,” added Mayol-Cuevas, a reader in robotics, computer vision and mobile systems.

“Eventually we want to move to automated teaching of the tasks, perhaps by observation on how a skilled user does things.”

Compared with power tools that have a motor and some basic sensors, the handheld robots have been designed to have more degrees of motion to allow greater independence from the motions of the user, and are aware of the steps being carried out.