Mimus CNK

The Curious Robot Comes to Warsaw

In August 2024, the Copernicus Science Centre (Centrum Nauki Kopernik) invited Mimus to join their The Future Is Today exhbition as a permanent robot-in-residence.

Implementation Details

This latest version of Mimus represents a significant technical improvement from the original Mimus from 2016: the brain and sensors have received a major upgrade. Mimus at the Copernicus Science Center uses a custom Omniverse Isaac Sim extension to control a Kawasaki RS007L industrial robot arm. The simulation’s kinematic solver and obstacle avoidance enables the robot to do generative, on-the-fly movements — instead of relying on traditional pre-planned paths.

The simulation receives skeletal and point cloud data from two Orbecc Femto Mega depth cameras mounted outside the robot’s enclosure. Skeletal data allows easy tracking of adults’ heads, hands, and bodies — whereas the raw point cloud data is used so Mimus can see and interact with people not included in the baked-in algorithms, such as small children, strollers, and visitors in wheelchairs.

All these systems are run off a single laptop — running the latest NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics card — and a PoE+ network switch. We opted to use a laptop, because there wasn’t a desktop powerful enough the could fit within the constrained 12” x 18” x 4” (30.5cm x 40.5cm x 10cm) electronics cabinet.

A debug view testing the efficacy of all the sensors, simulation, and communication layers working together.

Project Credits

Commissioned by: Copernicus Science Centre / Centrum Nauki Kopernik

Year: 2024

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Robot: Kawasaki RS007L