NimbRo Explorer: Semiautonomous Exploration and Mobile Manipulation in Rough Terrain

TLDR

Robotic exploration and manipulation in rough terrain remain beyond current capabilities, motivating competitions that benchmark progress in this area. The authors built an integrated robot system to semiautonomously conduct planetary exploration and manipulation tasks in the 2013 DLR SpaceBot Cup. The system combines 3‑D laser and RGB‑D perception for mapping and navigation, manipulation modules for pick‑and‑place, shared‑autonomy teleoperation interfaces, and a robust ROS network layer, all evaluated through systematic experiments. Demonstrated at the 2013 DLR SpaceBot Cup, the system performed many mission components autonomously.

Abstract

Fully autonomous exploration and mobile manipulation in rough terrain are still beyond the state of the art—robotics challenges and competitions are held to facilitate and benchmark research in this direction. One example is the 2013 DLR SpaceBot Cup, for which we developed an integrated robot system to semiautonomously perform planetary exploration and manipulation tasks. Our robot explores, maps, and navigates in previously unknown, uneven terrain using a three‐dimensional laser scanner and an omnidirectional RGB‐D camera. We developed manipulation capabilities for object retrieval and pick‐and‐place tasks. Many parts of the mission can be performed autonomously. In addition, we developed teleoperation interfaces on different levels of shared autonomy, which allow for specifying missions, monitoring mission progress, and on‐the‐fly reconfiguration. To handle network communication interruptions and latencies between robot and operator station, we implemented a robust network layer for the middleware Robot Operating System (ROS). The integrated system has been demonstrated at the 2013 DLR SpaceBot Cup. In addition, we conducted systematic experiments to evaluate the performance of our approaches.