Robot DE NIRO: a human-centered, autonomous, mobile research platform for cognitively-enhanced manipulation
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We introduceRobot DE NIRO, an autonomous, collaborative, humanoid robot for mobilemanipulation. We built DE NIRO to perform a wide variety of manipulation behaviors, with afocus 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 caninteract naturally, reliably, and safely with humans, autonomously navigate through environmentson command, intelligently retrieve or move target objects, and avoid collisions efficiently. Wedescribe DE NIRO’s hardware and software, including an extensive vision sensor suite of 2Dand 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 manipulationcapabilities in three illustrative challenges: First, we have DE NIRO perform a fetch-an-objectchallenge. 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 capabilitiesinto dual-arm manipulation of larger objects. We put particular emphasis on the features thatenable DE NIRO to interact safely and naturally with humans. Our contribution is in sharinghow 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, adocumentation, videos and the CAD models of several hardware parts are openly availableavailable athttps://www.imperial.ac.uk/robot-intelligence/software/
Date Issued
2020-07-23
Date Acceptance
2020-04-21
Citation
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2020, A17
ISSN
2296-9144
Publisher
Frontiers Media
Journal / Book Title
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Volume
A17
Copyright Statement
© 2020 Falck, Doshi, Tormento, Nersisyan, Smuts, Lingi, Rants, Saputra, Wang and Kormushev. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
License URL
Identifier
http://kormushev.com/papers/Falck_Frontiers-2020.pdf
Subjects
0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 66