Robot Task Commander: A framework and IDE for robot application development

Hart, Stephen; Dinh, Paul C.; Yamokoski, John D.; Wightman, Brian; Radford, Nicolaus

doi:10.1109/iros.2014.6942761

Cited by 24 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Contact constraints for the hands and feet were configured, though not always enabled, depending on whether contact with the environment was being made. Management of all of these tasks and constraints were done using a higher-level application called Robot Task Commander (RTC) 99 , which provided a graphical user interface for operators to instantiate and configure controllers based on ControlIt!, integrate these controllers with planners and other processes via ROS topics (locomotion was done using a phase space planner 117 ), and sequence their execution within a finite state machine. Integration of ControlIt!…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ControlIt! — A Software Framework for Whole-Body Operational Space Control

Fok

Johnson

Yamokoski

et al. 2016

Int. J. Human. Robot.

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ControlIt! — A Software Framework for Whole-Body Operational Space Control

Fok

Johnson

Yamokoski

et al. 2016

Int. J. Human. Robot.

Self Cite

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“…Robot task execution environments are available in other user interface systems. The Robot Task Commander is a visual programming language and IDE (Hart et al, 2014) designed to control the Robonaut-2 and Valkyrie platforms. The Affordance Template ROS Package for robot task programing (Hart et al, 2015) is an example of a planning framework based on affordance models that is integrated into the ROS software distribution.…”

Section: Approaches To Task Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Director: A User Interface Designed for Robot Operation with Shared Autonomy

Marion¹,

Fallon²,

Deits³

et al. 2018

Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics

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Operating a high degree of freedom mobile manipulator, such as a humanoid, in a field scenario requires constant situational awareness, capable perception modules, and effective mechanisms for interactive motion planning and control. A well-designed operator interface presents the operator with enough context to quickly carry out a mission and the flexibility to handle unforeseen operating scenarios robustly. By contrast, an unintuitive user interface can increase the risk of catastrophic operator error by overwhelming the user with unnecessary information. With these principles in mind, we present the philosophy and design decisions behind Director-the open-source user interface developed by Team MIT to pilot the Atlas robot in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). At the heart of Director is an integrated task execution system that specifies sequences of actions needed to achieve a substantive task, such as drilling a wall or climbing a staircase. These task sequences, developed a priori, make online queries to automated perception and planning algorithms with outputs that can be reviewed by the operator and executed by our whole-body controller. Our use of Director at the DRC resulted in efficient high-level task operation while being fully competitive with approaches focusing on teleoperation by highly-trained operators. We discuss the primary interface elements that comprise the Director and provide analysis of its successful use at the DRC.

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“…Robot Task Commander (RTC) is a robot programming environment that allows task developers to build applications out of controllers, and it enables sensory processing modules to perform complex tasks in real‐world environments (Hart, Dinh, Yamokoski, Wightman, and Radford, ). RTC provides an integrated development environment (IDE) that is suitable for both development and deployment of applications that can respond to different, possibly unforeseen, situations either autonomously or by enabling operators to modify these programs quickly in the field.…”

Section: Supervisory Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valkyrie: NASA's First Bipedal Humanoid Robot

Radford

Strawser

Hambuchen

et al. 2015

Journal of Field Robotics

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247

108

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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.

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Robot Task Commander: A framework and IDE for robot application development

Cited by 24 publications

References 14 publications

ControlIt! — A Software Framework for Whole-Body Operational Space Control

ControlIt! — A Software Framework for Whole-Body Operational Space Control

Director: A User Interface Designed for Robot Operation with Shared Autonomy

Valkyrie: NASA's First Bipedal Humanoid Robot

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