Modular low-cost humanoid platform for disaster response

Abstract

Developing a reliable humanoid robot that operates in uncharted real-world environments is a huge challenge for both hardware and software. Commensurate with the technology hurdles, the amount of time and money required can also be prohibitive barriers. This paper describes Team THOR’s approach to overcoming such barriers for the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials. We focused on forming modular components – in both hardware and software – to allow for efficient and cost effective parallel development. The robotic hardware consists of standardized and general purpose actuators and structural components. These allowed us to successfully build the robot from scratch in a very short development period, modify configurations easily and perform quick field repair. Our modular software framework consists of a hybrid locomotion controller, a hierarchical arm controller and a platform-independent operator interface. These modules helped us to keep up with hardware changes easily and to have multiple control options to suit various situations. We validated our approach at the DRC Trials where we fared very well against robots many times more expensive.