Hose task at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge trials: Team ViGIR's results video

Team ViGIR entered the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with a focus on developing software to enable an operator to guide a humanoid robot through the series of challenge tasks emulating disaster scenarios. We designed our operator control station (OCS) to allow multiple operators to request and share information as needed to maintain situational awareness under bandwidth constraints, while directing the robot to perform tasks with most planning and control taking place onboard the robot. Given the limited development time we leveraged a number of open source libraries in both our onboard software and our OCS design; this included significant use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) libraries and toolchain. The DRC consisted of 8 tasks; this video shows our approach for the Hose task, where the remote operator guides the robot through the OCS to walk towards a reel to pick up a hose, then walk with the hose towards a wye and attach the hose to it. Synchronized footage from both, Hose scenario and screen cast of the OCS, shows step by step how the operator interacts with the robot through template based manipulation and high level semantic commands like defining waypoints or objects to be grasped.