Abstract
We introduce Robot DE NIRO, an autonomous, collaborative, humanoid robot for mobile manipulation. We built DE NIRO to perform a wide variety of manipulation behaviors, with a focus on pick-and-place tasks. DE NIRO is designed to be used in a domestic environment, especially in support of caregivers working with the elderly. Given this design focus, DE NIRO can interact naturally, reliably, and safely with humans, autonomously navigate through environments on command, intelligently retrieve or move target objects, and avoid collisions efficiently. We describe DE NIRO's hardware and software, including an extensive vision sensor suite of 2D and 3D LIDARs, a depth camera, and a 360-degree camera rig; two types of custom grippers; and a custom-built exoskeleton called DE VITO. We demonstrate DE NIRO's manipulation capabilities in three illustrative challenges: First, we have DE NIRO perform a fetch-an-object challenge. Next, we add more cognition to DE NIRO's object recognition and grasping abilities, confronting it with small objects of unknown shape. Finally, we extend DE NIRO's capabilities into dual-arm manipulation of larger objects. We put particular emphasis on the features that enable DE NIRO to interact safely and naturally with humans. Our contribution is in sharing how a humanoid robot with complex capabilities can be designed and built quickly with off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. Supplementary Material including our code, a documentation, videos and the CAD models of several hardware parts are openly available at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/robot-intelligence/software/.
Highlights
Over the last decade, robots have increasingly appeared outside of factories and in homes (Bekey, 2012; Fortunati et al, 2015)
We propose a robot system whose design in both hardware and software goes in the latter direction: Robot DE NIRO (Design Engineering’s Natural Interaction RObot)
Regardless of the constraints, RRTConnect performs reliably with a small, low-variant processing time. This is the algorithm we used as a solution to this challenge. In this paper1, we presented the design and implementation of Robot DE NIRO to support adaptive, complex manipulation behaviors that may be common in a domestic environment
Summary
Robots have increasingly appeared outside of factories and in homes (Bekey, 2012; Fortunati et al, 2015). Unique demands of the household environment have led to an explosion in robot designs. Robots in the home often need to be autonomously mobile and able to interact with dynamic environments and objects of unexpected shapes and sizes. Baxter robot arms researchers who may be interested in swiftly constructing their own robots with general capacities for natural interaction. We devote most of our space to describing the logic of how we approached certain problems, in order to allow other researchers to compare and perhaps apply their own solutions. Key phrases or descriptors in robotics can be overlapping or ambiguous. For clarity’s sake, we will define how we use certain terms in this paper
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