Abstract
The Electric Series Compliant Humanoid for Emergency Response (ESCHER) platform represents the culmination of four years of development at Virginia Tech to produce a full sized force controlled humanoid robot capable of operating in unstructured environments. ESCHER’s locomotion capability was demonstrated at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals when it successfully navigated the 61 m loose dirt course. Team VALOR, a Track A team, developed ESCHER leveraging and improving upon bipedal humanoid technologies implemented in previous research efforts, specifically for traversing uneven terrain and sustained untethered operation. This paper presents the hardware platform, software, and control systems developed to field ESCHER at the DRC Finals. ESCHER’s unique features include custom linear series elastic actuators (SEAs) in both single and dual actuator configurations and a whole-body control framework supporting compliant locomotion across variable and shifting terrain. A high-level software system designed using the Robot Operating System (ROS) integrated various open-source packages and interfaced with the existing whole-body motion controller. The paper discusses a detailed analysis of challenges encountered during the competition, along with lessons learned critical for transitioning research contributions to a fielded robot. Empirical data collected before, during, and after the DRC Finals validates ESCHER’s performance in fielded environments.
A version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 34, issue 5, pp. 912–939, © Wiley 2017.
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Acknowledgements
This material is supported by ONR through grant N00014-11-1-0074 and by DARPA through grant N65236-12-1-1002. We would like to thank Virginia Tech’s Department of Engineering for providing support through student funding and travel compensation. We would also like to thank the following people: the members of Team ViGIR for their collaboration, especially David Conner, Stefan Kohlbrecher, and Ben Waxler for taking time to help with documenting and debugging; Derek Lahr, Bryce Lee, Steve Ressler, Joe Holler, and all of the TREC undergraduate volunteers, without whose help design, assembly, and testing would not have been possible; Ruihao Wang and Sam Blanchard for the collaborative design of ESCHER’s covers; and Christian Rippe for providing FEA throughout the chest design process. Lastly, thank you to additional team sponsors including the General Motors Foundation, HDT Global, Maxon Precision Motors, NetApp, Rapid Manufacturing, and THK.
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Knabe, C. et al. (2018). Team VALOR’s ESCHER: A Novel Electromechanical Biped for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. In: Spenko, M., Buerger, S., Iagnemma, K. (eds) The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals: Humanoid Robots To The Rescue. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74666-1_15
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