Enabling Rapid End-to-End Programming of Mobile Manipulators

Programming mobile manipulator robots requires specialized knowledge of robot perception, manipulation, and software frameworks. This puts robot programming out of reach for programmers who have not invested the time to learn these skills. The goal of our research is to make it possible for all programmers to develop applications for mobile manipulators such as clearing a table, fetching items, or playing games with people. This extended abstract describes our current work on Code3, a framework that all programmers can use to program robots. A user study we conducted showed that non-roboticist programmers were able to use our system to program a PR2 robot to clear a table and retrieve snacks. We also discuss our plans to extend this system to make it more useful and usable for real-world use cases.