Towards supervisory control of humanoid robots for driving vehicles during disaster response missions

We describe the approach of Worcester Polytechnic Institute's (WPI) Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS)to the utility vehicle driving task at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials held in December 2013. WRECS was one of only seven teams to attempt the driving task, and the only team with an ATLAS robot to successfully drive the course. We implement a supervisory control system that allows the robot to control the speed of the vehicle, while the operator helps the robot steer the vehicle. Two different methods of estimating speed, using the LIDAR and stereo cameras, are presented, and the performance of the robot at the Trials is discussed.