ControlIt, middleware for instantiating whole body operational space controllers for humanoid robots, Human Centered Robotics Lab (HCR Laboratory), Un

NASA, the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin and Texas A&M made it to the DRC Trials. Here Valkyrie manipulates a valve while standing up. Valkyrie is a new bipedal robot that was designed and built from scratch in just 9 months. Although this year we did not have a lot of time to get the hardware and software finalized to fully compete, we are here in the competition for the endgame in 2014.

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This video, shows snapshots from several groups at the University of Texas at Austin developing Human-Centered Robotic Technologies. Human Centered Robotics is the field that studies the assistance, augmentation and cooperation of humans and robots. Assistant Professor Luis Sentis describes his work on semi-autonomous humanoid robots for The Office of Naval Research, NASA, and DARPA. Assistant Professor Ashish Deshpande describes his research on robots that attach to the human body for rehabilitation and health assistive applications. Associate Professor Jonathan Dingwell studies physical and sensory impairment using virtual reality and robotic techniques. Finally, Assistant Professor James Sulzer develops robotic technologies for stroke rehabilitation using neuro-feedback of brain activity acquired through MRI scans.

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Dreamer is controlled using the open source feedback compliant control middleware ControlIt! ControlIt!, is now open source and available online at:

ControlIt! is designed to achieve feedback torque control of Meka's dual arm manipulation system and the robot's redundant pose while handling the lower torso's bi-articular transmission constraints. It uses state-of-the art software libraries and has a highly modular architecture for facilitating support for additional control primitives, real-time Linux patches, and robot hardware. We are particularly interested in having ControlIt! being integrated with other torque controlled highly-redundant robots.

Software Features: - OS: Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 - Real-time patches: RTAI, RT-Preempt - ROS: Hydro and Indigo - Linear algebra library: Eigen 3 - Model library: RBDL 2.3.2 - Model description: URDF - Integration with higher-level software: parameter binding - Integration with lower-level software: RobotInterface and ServoClock plugins - Controller introspection: Parameter reflection and ROS services - Controller configuration specification: YAML - Controller reconfiguration: enable / disable tasks and constraints - Controller primitives: Tasks and constraints structured into compound tasks and constraint sets - Number of threads: 1, 2, or 3 (one of which is the real-time servo thread) - Simulator: Gazebo 5.1

Real-time performance when configured with 5 tasks and two constraints, servo computational latency on an Intel i7-4771 3.56GHz CPU is: - multi-threaded: 0.603 ± 0.0166 ms - single-threaded: 0.882 ± 0.0168 ms

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Shows various simulations of ControlIt! making Valkyrie perform manipulation and locomotion tasks.

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