Towards supervisory control of humanoid robots for driving vehicles during disaster response missions

Author

Knoedler, Kevin ; Dimitrov, Velin ; Conn, Doug ; Gennert, Michael A. ; Padir, Taskin

fYear

2015

fDate

11-12 May 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

We describe the approach of Worcester Polytechnic Institute´s (WPI) Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS)to the utility vehicle driving task at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials held in December 2013. WRECS was one of only seven teams to attempt the driving task, and the only team with an ATLAS robot to successfully drive the course. We implement a supervisory control system that allows the robot to control the speed of the vehicle, while the operator helps the robot steer the vehicle. Two different methods of estimating speed, using the LIDAR and stereo cameras, are presented, and the performance of the robot at the Trials is discussed.

Keywords

disasters; humanoid robots; image sensors; mobile robots; optical radar; robot vision; stereo image processing; velocity control; ATLAS robot; DARPA; DRC; LIDAR; WPI; WRECS; Worcester Polytechnic Institute robotics engineering C squad; defense advanced research projects agency robotics challenge trials; disaster response missions; humanoid robots; stereo cameras; supervisory control system; vehicle driving; vehicle speed; Cameras; Joints; Mobile robots; Robot kinematics; Robot vision systems; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Woburn, MA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/TePRA.2015.7219695

Filename

7219695