SkiROS:A four tiered architecture for task-level programming of industrial mobile manipulators

During the last decades, the methods for intuitive task level programming of robots have become a fundamental point of interest for industrial application. The paper in hand presents SkiROS (Skill-based Robot Operating System) a novel software architecture based on the skills paradigm. The skill paradigm has already been used and tested within the FP7 project TAPAS, and we are going to use it in several new FP7 projects (CARLOS, STAMINA, ACAT). It facilitates task-level programming of mobile manipulators by providing the robot with a set of movement primitives, skills and tasks. This hierarchy brings many advantages, where the most relevant is the separation of control in the layers of hardware abstraction(proxy), multi-sensory control(primitive), object-level abstraction (skill) and planning (task). The definition and the clear division in different abstraction levels allows the implementation of a flexible, highly modular system for the development of cognitive robot tasks

Automated Planning of Industrial Logistics on a Skill-equipped Robot

Automated task planning for robots is usually implemented on a motion primitive domain, where the focus is on constructing meaningful, general motion primitives. In this work we propose planning on the higher abstraction level of robot skills. In this context, skills are general, functional blocks that contain both sensing and action, have a welldefined expected outcome and set of preconditions, and are thus immediately useful for planning. By using a world model, which is focused on the skills, we show that this is in fact the case. We show automated task planning and execution, as a sequence of skills and their parameters, based on the desired goal state and the current state from the world model. Experiments show that the approach is immediately applicable, given a skill-equipped robot, and that inconsistencies between the world model and physical world are overcome simply by replanning

Gesture-Based Extraction of Robot Skill Parameters for Intuitive Robot Programming

Despite a lot of research in the field, only very little experience exists with Teaching by Demonstration (TbD) in actual industrial use cases. In the factory of the future, it is necessary to rapidly reprogram flexible mobile manipulators to perform new tasks, when the need arises, for which a working system capable of TbD would be ideal. Contrary to current TbD approaches, that generally aim to recognize both action and where it is applied, we propose a division of labor, where the operator manually specifies the action the robot should perform, while gestures are used for specifying the relevant action parameter (e.g. on which object to apply the action). Using this two-step method has the advantages that there is no uncertainty of which action the robot will perform, it takes into account that the environment changes, so objects do not need to be at predefined locations, and the parameter specification is possible even for inexperienced users. Experiments with 24 people in 3 different environments verify that it is indeed intuitive, even for a robotics novice, to program a mobile manipulator using this method

Intuitive Skill-Level Programming of Industrial Handling Tasks on a Mobile Manipulator

In order for manufacturing companies to remain competitive while also offering a high degree of customization for the customers, flexible robots that can be rapidly reprogrammed to new tasks need to be applied in the factories. In this paper we propose a method for the intuitive programming of an industrial mobile robot by combining robot skills, a graphical user interface and human gesture recognition. We give a brief introduction to robot skills as we envision them for intuitive programming, and how they are used in the robot system. We then describe the tracking and gesture recognition, and how the instructor uses the method for programming. We have verified our approach through experiments on several subjects, showing that the system is generally easy to use even for inexperienced users. Furthermore, the programming time required to program a new task is very short, especially keeping traditional industrial robot programming methods in mind