Deploying the NASA Valkyrie Humanoid for IED Response: An Initial Approach and Evaluation Summary

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the initial deployment of the NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot performing complex IED response tasks, highlighting technical approaches, challenges, and limitations to motivate further research for practical use.

Contribution

It presents an initial end-to-end demonstration of a humanoid robot performing IED response tasks, including technical solutions and analysis of challenges faced.

Findings

Operator pauses account for 50% of total task time

Robot successfully traversed uneven terrain and manipulated objects

Limitations identified to guide future improvements

Abstract

As part of a feasibility study, this paper shows the NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot performing an end-to-end improvised explosive device (IED) response task. To demonstrate and evaluate robot capabilities, sub-tasks highlight different locomotion, manipulation, and perception requirements: traversing uneven terrain, passing through a narrow passageway, opening a car door, retrieving a suspected IED, and securing the IED in a total containment vessel (TCV). For each sub-task, a description of the technical approach and the hidden challenges that were overcome during development are presented. The discussion of results, which explicitly includes existing limitations, is aimed at motivating continued research and development to enable practical deployment of humanoid robots for IED response. For instance, the data shows that operator pauses contribute to 50\% of the total completion time, which implies that further work is needed on user interfaces for increasing task completion efficiency.