Achieving Reliable Humanoid Robot Operations in the DARPA Robotics Challenge: Team WPI-CMU's Approach

摘要

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was aimed at responding to natural and man-made disasters by human-robot teams (Pratt and Manzo 2013). What if we had been able to prevent hydrogen explosions in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant by using robots within the first hour after it was hit by a tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan earthquake in 2011? Since its announcement in 2012, the DRC has mobilized hundreds of robotics researchers, practitioners and makers to accelerate the research and development in robotics for disaster response. The DRC Finals on June 5-6, 2015 brought 23 qualified teams to Pomona, CA to demonstrate their systems in a disaster mission scenario. In a simulated environment, robots performed a variety of manipulation and mobility tasks under human supervision with a 1-h mission completion time. For greater realism, the communications between the operator(s) and robot was degraded during parts of the mission.