Team THOR's adaptive autonomy for disaster response humanoids

Abstract

This paper describes Team THOR's approach to sliding autonomy in manipulation and full body control of a disaster response robot for the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. Under the duress of unpredictable bandwidth constraints, autonomous behaviors become critical for reducing response time and dealing with dynamic disturbances. However, the nature of disaster response presents situations where fine grained and intricate teleoperation remain the only safe method of operation. We present sets of algorithms that gracefully switch among high level autonomous behaviors and low levels of teleoperated control. Manipulation algorithms interact in a hierarchical fashion within a state machine, transitioning between states autonomously or through human intervention. Similarly, the balancing controller scales from low degree of freedom walking to full body motions. To validate our methods, we show results from attempts at the DRC Finals and in our preparation for it.