An Experience-Based Interface for Abstracting the Motion Control of Kinematically Complex Robots

Abstract :

In order to provide higher mobility and to assist humans in building up infrastructure in future extraterrestrial space missions, kinematically complex robots are needed. One key challenge which needs to be addressed is to handle their complex motion control and to make use of their high potential. Utilizing the possibility to achieve various actions even in different ways by tuning manually numerous parameters of the motion control can be very demanding and even unmanageable when also taking communication delay into account. Thus, the proposed experience-based interface is encapsulating the motion control of complex robots by autonomously mapping application-specific action parameters to robot-specific motion control parameters depending on the current context. Therefore, the robot is using experiences collected from previously executed behaviors. Apart from acquiring experiences during operation of the real robot, they can also be collected in simulation. The possibility to test in low gravity environments makes the latter a valuable tool for increasing the robot’s knowledge base for space missions. The experiments in this paper show that reconfiguring the motion control can be beneficial and that in simulation optimized behaviors can easily be integrated in the experience-based control interface to improve the performance of a robot. In addition, the transferability from simulation to the real system is shown. Key words: kinematically complex robots, experiencedbased control, behavior adaptation.

Files:

dettmann_camera_readyASTRA2015An_Experience-Based_Interface_for_Abstracting_the_Motion_Control_of_Kinematically_Complex_Robots.pdf

Links:

http://robotics.estec.esa.int/ASTRA/Astra2015/Papers/Poster%20Session/P05_Dettmann.pdf