Team IHMC's Lessons Learned from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

Johnson, Matthew; Shrewsbury, Brandon; Bertrand, Sylvain; Wu, Tingfan; Duran, Daniel; Floyd, Marshall; Abeles, Peter; Stephen, Douglas; Mertins, Nathan; Lesman, Alex; Carff, John; Rifenburgh, William; Kaveti, Pushyami; Straatman, Wessel; Smith, Jesper; Griffioen, Maarten; Layton, Brooke; Boer, Tomas de; Koolen, Twan; Neuhaus, Peter; Pratt, Jerry

doi:10.1002/rob.21571

Cited by 223 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The simulation, the real robot, and all the control modules were updated in just 2 days. As suggested by Johnson et al (2015), we fully understand (and wish) that in a long-term project APIs must not be modified, especially few days before the demo. However, we are convinced that, in a research environment APIs may need to be changed in critical moments, and the proposed approach is a way to mitigate the effect of such changes.…”

Section: Hardware/simulation Abstraction Layermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar works have been developed by teams participating in the DRC Trials, such as Johnson et al (2015) and Yi et al (2015), and Hebert et al (2015). Most of these works have a custom low-level communication library, or middleware, which ensures a real-time control loop and a high level inter-process communication system (such as ROS, Orocos, OpenRTM, and PODO).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

et al. 2016

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A software and control architecture for a humanoid robot is a complex and large project, which involves a team of developers/researchers to be coordinated and requires many hard design choices. If such project has to be done in a very limited time, i.e., less than 1 year, more constraints are added and concepts, such as modular design, code reusability, and API definition, need to be used as much as possible. In this work, we describe the software architecture developed for Walk-Man, a robot participant at the Darpa Robotics Challenge. The challenge required the robot to execute many different tasks, such as walking, driving a car, and manipulating objects. These tasks need to be solved by robotics specialists in their corresponding research field, such as humanoid walking, motion planning, or object manipulation. The proposed architecture was developed in 10 months, provided boilerplate code for most of the functionalities required to control a humanoid robot and allowed robotics researchers to produce their control modules for DRC tasks in a short time. Additional capabilities of the architecture include firmware and hardware management, mixing of different middlewares, unreliable network management, and operator control station GUI. All the source code related to the architecture and some control modules have been released as open source projects.

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Section: Hardware/simulation Abstraction Layermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

et al. 2016

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“…In the 2015 DARPA robotics challenge, most of the robots were semiautonomous. Autonomous operation has already been implemented in posture control and route planning; however, overall human control remains unreplaceable [1,2]. The most common applications for teleoperated robots include missions under unstructured or unknown environments such as searchand-rescue operations at disaster sites [3], deep sea or space exploration [4], and dealing with radioactive waste.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual support system for remote control by adaptive ROI selection of monitoring robot

2018

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A visual assistance system has become attractive as a technique to improve the efficiency and stability of remote control. While an operator controls a working robot, another autonomous monitoring robot evaluates a suitable viewpoint to observe the work site, and dynamically moves to the optimal viewpoint for monitoring. Choosing the observation region (ROI: region of interest) is equivalent to deciding the action of the following autonomous monitoring system. Therefore, we focus on ROI detection in our visual support system. We propose an ROI selection method to identify the most suitable observation point and interobject relations. The monitoring robot detects a gestalt of the scene in order to identify the relations between objects. Such an adaptive ROI in real time improves the efficiency of the remote control. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of execution time and number of errors.

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“…Simpler estimators have been proposed in combination with balancing controllers, often leading to impressive experimental results [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]. These estimators often achieve their simplicity by decoupling the estimation of orientation and position.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evaluation of simple estimators for humanoid robots

Flayols

Prete

Wensing

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE-RAS 17th International Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids)

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Abstract-This paper introduces and evaluates a family of new simple estimators to reconstruct the pose and velocity of the floating base. The estimation of the floating-base state is a critical challenge to whole-body control methods that rely on full-state information in high-rate feedback. Although the kinematics of grounded limbs may be used to estimate the pose and velocity of the body, modelling errors from ground irregularity, foot slip, and structural flexibilities limit the utility of estimation from kinematics alone. These difficulties have motivated the development of sensor fusion methods to augment body-mounted IMUs with kinematic measurements. Existing methods often rely on extended Kalman filtering, which lack convergence guarantees and may present difficulties in tuning. This paper proposes two new simplifications to the floating-base state estimation problem that make use of robust off-the-shelf orientation estimators to bootstrap development. Experiments for in-place balance and walking with the HRP-2 show that the simplifications yield results on par with the accuracy reported in the literature for other methods. As further benefits, the structure of the proposed estimators prevents divergence of the estimates, simplifies tuning, and admits efficient computation. These benefits are envisioned to help accelerate the development of baseline estimators in future humanoids.

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Team IHMC's Lessons Learned from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

Cited by 223 publications

References 16 publications

The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

The Walk-Man Robot Software Architecture

Visual support system for remote control by adaptive ROI selection of monitoring robot

Experimental evaluation of simple estimators for humanoid robots

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