Team ViGIR: DARPA Robotics Challenge

This report documents Team ViGIR’s efforts in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) between October 2012 and August 2015. Team ViGIR, a multinational collaborative research and development effort that spanned nine time zones, began as a Track B participant in the simulation-based Virtual Robotics Challenge; after placing in the top six, we began working the Atlas humanoid robotic system developed by Boston Dynamics. Team ViGIR competed in both the DRC Trials and DRC Finals. This report documents our performance, lessons learned along the way, and describes the novel contributions of our team. Specific focus areas include template-based manipulation, footstep planning, and autonomous behavior specification and execution. The software used in the competition and described in this report is being open sourced at http://github.com/team-vigir as part of our commitment to improving the capabilities of humanitarian rescue robotics