After the success of REEM humanoid, PAL Robotics, Spain has come up with TIAGo (Take It And Go). The bot is integrated with mobile manipulator system, which gives it an edge of mobile platform by extending the workspace of robotic manipulator arm.
The team aims towards making TIAGo the best study partner in the research environment as it is enabled for perception, manipulation and interaction tasks. The robot has sensor based tilting head, torso that can be lifted as per the requirements and one limb with a hand for ensuring maximum manipulation and interaction skills at workspace.
TIAGo is flexible, easily configurable & upgradable, open and reasonable. It is fully attuned with Robot Operating System (ROS) and comes with multiple out-of-the-box functionalities like:
1) Navigation system that relies on multitude of embedded sensors
2) Collision free path and motion planning
3) Object detection including people and faces
4) Speech recognition and processing for synthesis
If we look at the feel and the mobility factor, we find TIAGo resembling UBR-1 from the vault of Unbounded Robotics. Nevertheless, wheels base, spine, arm and a sensor head are the most basic elements in any given mobile manipulators. So we can expect more similar mobile manipulators hitting the market in the coming few years, and who knows, no sooner we too would own one of these for household affairs.
