Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot

Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting. Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201

On Foveated Gaze Control and Combined Gaze and Locomotion Planning

This chapter presents recent research results of our laboratory in the area of vision an

Motion primitive based random planning for loco-manipulation tasks

Several advanced control laws are available for complex robotic systems such as humanoid robots and mobile manipulators. Controls are usually developed for locomotion or for manipulation purposes. Resulting motions are usually executed sequentially and the potentiality of the robotic platform is not fully exploited. In this work we consider the problem of loco-manipulation planning for a robot with given parametrized control laws known as primitives. Such primitives, may have not been designed to be executed simultaneously and by composing them instability may easily arise. With the proposed approach, primitives combination that guarantee stability of the system are obtained resulting in complex whole-body behavior. A formal definition of motion primitives is provided and a random sampling approach on a manifold with limited dimension is investigated. Probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality are also proved. The proposed approach is tested both on a mobile manipulator and on the humanoid robot Walk-Man, performing loco-manipulation tasks