Abstract
This article presents the core elements of a cross-platform tactile capabilities interface (TCI) for humanoid arms. The aim of the interface is to reduce the cost of developing humanoid robot capabilities by supporting reuse through cross-platform deployment. The article presents a comparative analysis of existing robot middleware frameworks, as well as the technical details of the TCI framework that builds on the the existing YARP platform. The TCI framework currently includes robot arm actuators with robot skin sensors. It presents such hardware in a platform independent manner, making it possible to write robot control software that can be executed on different robots through the TCI frameworks. The TCI framework supports multiple humanoid platforms and this article also presents a case study of a cross-platform implementation of a set of tactile protective withdrawal reflexes that have been realised on both the Nao and iCub humanoid robot platforms using the same high-level source code.
Highlights
During the last few decades, robots have been used with success in various domains ranging from manufacturing (Merzouki et al, 2010), space exploration (Ambrose et al, 2010), and surgery (McMahan et al, 2011) to mining (Bednarz et al, 2011) and military assistance (Wooden et al, 2010)
The two extracts of code introduce difficulties for maintainability and reusability because each robot arm has a unique initial position tuple and unique coordinate systems. These differences introduce extra costs when it comes to supporting multiple humanoid platforms, even for simple generic motions. This problem is addressed by the tactile capabilities interface (TCI), which forces arms to be represented in the form of abstracted five degrees of freedom (DoF), disregarding the DoF it has
The XML configuration file contains the underlying data needed for controlling the real servos and the information necessary to support a run-time reconstruction of the kinematic chain, e.g., TCI can provide a YARP device that gives run-time access to the Denavit–Hartenberg parameters as well as servospecific information such as angle and velocity limits
Summary
This article presents the core elements of a cross-platform tactile capabilities interface (TCI) for humanoid arms. The aim of the interface is to reduce the cost of developing humanoid robot capabilities by supporting reuse through cross-platform deployment. The TCI framework includes robot arm actuators with robot skin sensors. It presents such hardware in a platform-independent manner, making it possible to write robot control software that can be executed on different robots through the TCI frameworks. The TCI framework supports multiple humanoid platforms, and this article presents a case study of a cross-platform implementation of a set of tactile protective withdrawal reflexes that have been realized on both the NAO and iCub humanoid robot platforms using the same high-level source code
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