About

Meet HanS

HanS is a Health and Safety Robot Inspector , which was developed by Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) robotics team.

HanS is an experiment in service robotics and has been designed to be able to patrol the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to try and identify possible violations to Health and Safety rules.
For instance, typical rules check that all fire extinguishers are in place and that emergency exits are free of obstacles and clearly labelled through the correct signs.

Currently, HanS is able to recognise many objects commonly found in office spaces automatically (without relying on ARTags), after being trained on only a few shots captured from the target environment.

HanS is aware of the typical size and spatial realtions of objects. HanS Knowledge Base was autonomously constructed and summarise from a number of large-scale resources, including WordNet, ShapeNet, Visual Genome, and Quasimodo.

Thanks its commonsense reasoning capabilities, HanS can autonomously assess the risks posed by the situations it observes.

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News

Developed by the Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) robotics team, HanS is an experimental service robot designed to patrol the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and identify potential health and safety violations. From ensuring fire extinguishers are properly placed to checking that emergency exits are clear and correctly marked, HanS uses advanced computer vision and commonsense reasoning to detect risks in real-world office environments. Trained with only a few images from its surroundings and drawing on knowledge from large-scale datasets like WordNet, ShapeNet, Visual Genome, and Quasimodo, HanS operates without the need for markers like ARTags. Its autonomous knowledge base and spatial awareness allow it to make intelligent, real-time assessments of workplace safety.

KR 2020 Towards a Framework for Visual Intelligence in Service Robotics

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Digital Development Services 15 Apr 2025

KR2020

Sep. 2020 - We presented our work at KR2020! Watch the...

Digital Development Services 15 Apr 2025

Latest work

Our latest work on integrating knowledge-based reasoning about object sizes within ML is now available on ArXiv. Be sure to visit our Github for...

Digital Development Services 15 Apr 2025

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People

Team

HanS was created by members of the Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) team at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University. The ISDS team brings together researchers and engineers with expertise in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and data science. Their work focuses on building intelligent systems that can understand, reason, and act in complex real-world environments. By combining cutting-edge research with practical experimentation, the team has developed innovative technologies like HanS to explore how autonomous systems can support real-world tasks such as health and safety monitoring.

Gianluca Bardaro

Starting from his master thesis he worked on robotics, mostly on autonomous off-road vehicles, with a particular focus on software development and architectural aspect. His PhD work revolve around how to make robotic development more accessible to the different actors involved.

Dr Agnese Chiatti

Agnese is a post-doctoral researcher at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Open University, UK. Her research focuses on Computer Vision applications in Robotics, with a particular focus on Neuro-symbolic Learning methods. She is interested in how robots can autonomously build and maintain a visual model of the environment in which they are deployed. Agnese is also a Visiting Fellow at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), thanks to funding from the L'Oreal-UNESCO "For Women in Science" Program. She obtained a PhD In Artificial Intelligence from the Open University and holds a MS in Information Sciences and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University.

Enrico Daga

Enrico Daga has carried out R&D on Web Semantics first at the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and then at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University in the UK, where he obtained a PhD. Enrico is currently Senior Research Fellow in KMi.

Prof Enrico Motta

I lead the KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science research group, which carries out research in a variety of areas relevant to the development of user-centric, intelligent, data-intensive solutions, including Data Science, Semantic Web Technologies, Visual Analytics, Robotics, Large-Scale Data Infrastructures, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction and others. Application domains include (but are not limited to) Smart Cities, News Analytics, Scholarly Data and Digital Humanities and Learning.

See the Full Team