Human-Robot Teaming for Rescue Missions: Team ViGIR´s Approach to the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

Team ViGIR entered the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with a focus on developing software to enable an operator to guide a humanoid robot through the series of challenge tasks emulating disaster response scenarios. The overarching philosophy was to make our operators full team members and not just simple supervisors. We designed our operator control station (OCS) to allow multiple operators to request and share information as needed to maintain situational awareness under bandwidth constraints, while directing the robot to perform tasks with most planning and control taking place onboard the robot. Given the limited development time we leveraged a number of open source libraries in both our onboard software and our OCS design; this included significant use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) libraries and toolchain. This paper describes the high level approach, including the OCS design and major onboard components, and describes our DRC Trials results. The paper concludes with a number of lessons learned that are being applied to the final phase of the competition and are useful for related projects as well