Abstract-NASA and General Motors have developed the second generation Robonaut, Robonaut 2 or R2, and it is scheduled to arrive on the International Space Station in late 2010 and undergo initial testing in early 2011. This state of the art, dexterous, anthropomorphic robotic torso has significant technical improvements over its predecessor making it a far more valuable tool for astronauts. Upgrades include: increased force sensing, greater range of motion, higher bandwidth and improved dexterity. R2's integrated mechatronics design results in a more compact and robust distributed control system with a faction of the wiring of the original Robonaut. Modularity is prevalent throughout the hardware and software along with innovative and layered approaches for sensing and control. The most important aspects of the Robonaut philosophy are clearly present in this latest model's ability to allow comfortable human interaction and in its design to perform significant work using the same hardware and interfaces used by people. The following describes the mechanisms, integrated electronics, control strategies and user interface that make R2 a promising addition to the Space Station and other environments where humanoid robots can assist people.

In December 2013, 16 teams from around the world gathered at Homestead Speedway near Miami, FL to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials, an aggressive robotics competition partly inspired by the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor incident. While the focus of the DRC Trials is to advance robotics for use in austere and inhospitable environments, the objectives of the DRC are to progress the areas of supervised autonomy and mobile manipulation for everyday robotics. NASA's Johnson Space Center led a team comprised of numerous partners to develop Valkyrie, NASA's first bipedal humanoid robot. Valkyrie is a 44 degree‐of‐freedom, series elastic actuator‐based robot that draws upon over 18 years of humanoid robotics design heritage. Valkyrie's application intent is aimed at not only responding to events like Fukushima, but also advancing human spaceflight endeavors in extraterrestrial planetary settings. This paper presents a brief system overview, detailing Valkyrie's mechatronic subsystems, followed by a summarization of the inverse kinematics‐based walking algorithm employed at the Trials. Next, the software and control architectures are highlighted along with a description of the operator interface tools. Finally, some closing remarks are given about the competition, and a vision of future work is provided.

Whole Body Operational Space Control (WBOSC) is a pioneering algorithm in the field of human-centered Whole-Body Control (WBC). It enables floating-base highlyredundant robots to achieve unified motion/force control of one or more operational space objectives while adhering to physical constraints. Although there are extensive studies on the algorithms and theory behind WBOSC, limited studies exist on the software architecture and APIs that enable WBOSC to perform and be integrated into a larger system. In this paper we address this by presenting ControlIt!, a new opensource software framework for WBOSC. Unlike previous implementations, ControlIt! is multi-threaded to increase servo frequencies on standard PC hardware. A new parameter binding mechanism enables tight integration between ControlIt! and external processes via an extensible set of transport protocols. To support a new robot, only two plugins and a URDF model needs to be provided -the rest of ControlIt! remains unchanged. New WBC primitives can be added by writing a Task or Constraint plugin. ControlIt!'s capabilities are demonstrated on Dreamer, a 16-DOF torque controlled humanoid upper body robot containing both series elastic and co-actuated joints, and using it to perform a product disassembly task. Using this testbed, we show that ControlIt! can achieve average servo latencies of about 0.5ms when configured with two Cartesian position tasks, two orientation tasks, and a lower priority posture task. This is significantly higher than the 5ms that was achieved using UTA-WBC, the prototype implementation of WBOSC that is both application and platform-specific. Variations in the product's position is handled by updating the goal of the Cartesian position task. ControlIt!'s source code is released under an LGPL license and we hope it will be adopted and maintained by the WBC community for the long term as a platform for WBC development and integration.main ControlIt! -A Software Framework for Whole-Body Operational Space Control 3 (6) We demonstrate ControlIt!'s utility and performance using a humanoid robot executing a product disassembly task.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 provides an overview of WBOSC's mathematical foundations. Section 4 presents ControlIt!'s software architecture and APIs. Section 5 presents how ControlIt! was integrated with Dreamer and used to develop a product disassembly task. Section 6 contains a discussion on other experiences using ControlIt! and future research directions. The paper ends with conclusions in Section 7. These efforts demonstrate the behaviors enabled by WBC such as the use of compliance, multi-contact postures, robot dynamics, and joint redundancy to balance multiple competing objectives. ControlIt! is currently focused on supporting general use of WBOSC and its capabilities, but may be enhanced to include ideas and capabilities from these recent WBC developments.An implementation of WBOSC called Stanford-WBC 68 was released in 2011. Stanford-...

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