Manufacturers need ways to evaluate robotic systems before introducing them into production. RoboCom, the Center on Robot Companions promoted by ARTES 4.0 in Pontedera, was created for exactly this purpose, built around a Test Before Invest approach.
The center allows companies and public organizations to test, compare, and validate robotic technologies before committing to an investment. Its infrastructure supports the evaluation of humanoid robots, collaborative robots, artificial intelligence systems, wearable technologies, and immersive teleoperation tools. As part of the collaboration between CIM and ARTES 4.0, Beko Europe took part in a demonstration focused on intelligent robotics for manufacturing.
During the demonstration, a human operator wore a motion capture suit and MANUS gloves. A humanoid robot positioned nearby moved in synchronization with the operator, replicating the demonstrated movements.
The body-tracking system captured the operator’s overall movement, while MANUS gloves captured the hand and finger motion involved in the demonstration. This enabled the operator’s hand movements to become part of the human input used to guide the robot.
For humanoid robotics, the hands are an important part of the demonstration. Body movement determines how the robot positions and moves its arms, while hand tracking provides information about how the operator performs the hand actions associated with the task.
MANUS gloves provide the hand-tracking layer within human-guided robotics workflows. By capturing detailed finger articulation and hand movements, the gloves complement full-body motion capture with the dexterity data needed to represent how a person interacts with the environment.
For manufacturers and robotics developers, this provides a practical way to include hand movement in robot evaluation. Instead of assessing only the robot’s navigation and arm motion, teams can also examine how effectively the system reproduces the hand actions required to complete a task.
The CIM and ARTES 4.0 Joint Lab supports manufacturers, system integrators, startups, and other organizations as they move from initial experimentation toward industrial validation.
For Beko Europe, the demonstration provided an opportunity to evaluate robots, intelligent systems, and enabling technologies in an advanced application environment before considering production-scale adoption.
Within this process, MANUS gloves help ensure that the operator’s hand movements are included in the demonstration. This gives robotics teams a more complete human-motion input when testing humanoid robots for teleoperation, task learning, and future manufacturing applications.
