PAL Robotics has introduced the TIAGo Pro Edition, an updated version of its flagship mobile manipulator. The latest version of the robot includes fully torque-controlled arms that enhance its manipulation capabilities and upgraded human/robot interaction (HRI) abilities.
The original TIAGo robot was patented by PAL Robotics in 2015, and since then, the company has grown the TIAGo family into various customizable robots including robots with one arm, two arms, and/or a touchscreen.
The TIAGo Pro Edition includes the mobile manipulation, navigation, and perception capabilities that come with the company’s previous versions of the robot, but with upgrades meant to meet research trends and need needs in mobile manipulation.
Hardware upgrades on the TIAGo Pro Edition include joint level, fully torque-controllable arms with brakes at each joint. This is a new version of PAL Robotics’ arms, with seven degrees of freedom and sequential, joint torque sensing through Series Elastic Elements. The Pro Edition also includes an EtherCAT communication bus with high bandwidth, and a new electronics architecture that includes increased computational power.
These robotic arms also have a different placement on the new TIAGo model. The new placement allows the robot to have a greater common workspace between two arms and an easy frontal and lateral reach. The Pro Edition can reach objects on the floor and on high shelves.
The TIAGo Pro Edition also includes enhanced HRI capabilities. This includes a user-friendly web user interface and a robot that is fully compatible with ROS 2. TIAGo Pro Edition’s face can display a range of emotions for maximum impact and engagement. The robot can also generate a range of eye expressions, like happy, sad, skeptical, and confused, and direct the robot’s gaze in a natural way.
The robot also includes the ROS4HRI ROS specification, which offers a 100% ROS-based representation model of humans, including 2D/3D real-time skeleton tracking, 6D head pose estimation, automatic facial landmark extraction, gaze tracking, and face identification. TIAGo Pro Edition also comes equipped with an algorithm for probabilistic data fusion enabling real-time matching of faces, skeletons, and people.
The TIAGo Pro Edition also offers fully offline speech recognition (ASR) in 20+ languages, a new chatbot engine, off-the-shelf “chit chat” chatbots available in various languages, voice synthesis (text-to-speech, TTS) with markup support to combine text, gestures and facial expressions, automatic subtitling of both ASR and TTS for added accessibility and an optional wake-up word detection system that is fully configurable and does not require pre-training.
