Human-in-the-loop Control of a Humanoid Robot for Disaster Response: A Report from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

The DARPA Robotics Challenge DRC requires teams to integrate mobility, manipulation, and perception to accomplish several disaster-response tasks. We describe our hardware choices and software architecture, which enable human-in-the-loop control of a 28 degree-of-freedom Atlas humanoid robot over a limited bandwidth link. We discuss our methods, results, and lessons learned for the DRC Trials tasks. The effectiveness of our system architecture was demonstrated as the WPI-CMU DRC Team scored 11 out of a possible 32 points, ranked seventh out of 16 at the DRC Trials, and was selected as a finalist for the DRC Finals.