From autonomy to cooperative traded control of humanoid manipulation tasks with unreliable communication: System design and lessons learned

In this paper, we report lessons learned through the design of a framework for teleoperating a humanoid robot to perform a manipulation task. We present a software framework for cooperative traded control that enables a team of operators to control a remote humanoid robot over an unreliable communications link. The framework produces statically-stable motion trajectories that are collision-free and respect end-effector pose constraints. After operator confirmation, these trajectories are sent over the data link for execution on the robot. Additionally, we have defined a clear operational procedure for the operators to manage the teleoperation task. We applied our system to the valve turning task in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). Our framework is able to perform reliably and is resilient to unreliable network conditions, as we demonstrate in a set of test runs performed remotely over the internet. We analyze our approach and discuss lessons learned which may be useful for others when designing such a system.