Toward a user-guided manipulation framework for high-DOF robots with limited communication

This paper presents our progress toward a user-guided manipulation framework for High Degree-of-Freedom robots operating in environments with limited communication. The system we propose consists of three components: (1) a user-guided perception interface which assists the user to provide task level commands to the robot, (2) planning algorithms that autonomously generate robot motion while obeying relevant constraints, and (3) a trajectory execution and monitoring system which detects errors in execution. We have performed quantitative experiments on these three components and qualitative experiments of the entire pipeline with the PR2 robot turning a valve for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. We ran 20 tests of the entire framework with an average run time of two minutes. We also report results for tests of each individual component.