Meeting the needs of the industry, considering the market volatility, seems to be a simple task for João Pedro Souza, INESC TEC researcher. After his PhD was considered one of the top three in the county at the Altice Innovation Awards (AIIA) 2022, he received the award for “Best PhD Thesis” granted by APCA – Portuguese Association of Automatic Control.
It is called “Adaptive Robotic Grasping Planning – A Novel Unified and Modular Grasping Pipeline Architecture” and “is based on the design of an innovative modular software architecture for robotic grasping, capable of being modified and reconfigured hierarchically, structured in a pipeline to organise the study and the evaluation of different approaches”, explained João Pedro Souza. In practical terms, it allows professionals to add new methodologies in a simplified way; it also allows end users to configure the workflow according to the requirements and needs of each task.
The proposal for a modular architecture for robotic grasping “allows the selection of various methods and techniques, benefiting industries, companies and researchers with their adaptability and flexibility”, explained the researcher.
João Pedro Souza’s work focuses on a set of innovative solutions that facilitate the integration and evaluation of different methodologies in production and services, providing an intuitive and powerful tool that meets the needs of the Industry. “In addition to improving the well-being of workers, enabling the fast implementation of robotic solutions, the scientific community also benefits from a software-based framework for testing new scientific contributions,” he said.
According to João Souza, winning this award is “a recognition of his work and dedication”, but also “a motivation to keep innovating”.
For now, research in this area continues with the application of this proposal in ongoing projects at INESC TEC, focused on mobile manipulation. “I aim to integrate and test the modular architecture in different practical scenarios, evaluating its effectiveness and adaptability. In addition, I plan to collaborate with other researchers to explore new methodologies and continuously improve the solution, towards addressing emerging needs of Industry 5.0”, he concluded.
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.
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