CoSTAR: Instructing Collaborative Robots with Behavior Trees and Vision

TL;DR

CoSTAR is a system enabling non-expert users to instruct collaborative robots through behavior trees and vision, creating robust, understandable task plans adaptable to various industrial applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system combining behavior trees and perception for end-user robot programming, demonstrated across multiple industrial robots.

Findings

Successfully created robust task plans using perception and behavior trees

System applicable to various industrial robots and tasks

Enhanced usability for non-expert users in robot programming

Abstract

For collaborative robots to become useful, end users who are not robotics experts must be able to instruct them to perform a variety of tasks. With this goal in mind, we developed a system for end-user creation of robust task plans with a broad range of capabilities. CoSTAR: the Collaborative System for Task Automation and Recognition is our winning entry in the 2016 KUKA Innovation Award competition at the Hannover Messe trade show, which this year focused on Flexible Manufacturing. CoSTAR is unique in how it creates natural abstractions that use perception to represent the world in a way users can both understand and utilize to author capable and robust task plans. Our Behavior Tree-based task editor integrates high-level information from known object segmentation and pose estimation with spatial reasoning and robot actions to create robust task plans. We describe the cross-platform design and implementation of this system on multiple industrial robots and evaluate its suitability for a wide variety of use cases.