Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot

TL;DR

This paper presents a supervised autonomy system for a hybrid legged-wheeled, anthropomorphic robot designed for disaster response, enabling flexible locomotion and manipulation in hazardous environments.

Contribution

It introduces a set of operator assistance functionalities with varying autonomy levels for complex tasks in disaster scenarios.

Findings

System demonstrated promising performance in disaster response tests.

Supervised autonomy improved control quality and speed.

The robot successfully adapted to diverse terrains and tasks.

Abstract

Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting. Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed promising performance.