• HRI
• humanoid robotics
• semi-autonomous control
• DRC

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) highlights the need to develop a new generation of robots who can assist humans in disasters scenarios.
In the recent years, the improvements of low-level capabilities in humanoid robotics raised the possibility to move towards a more autonomous behavior in that field.
The lack of strategical reasoning and overall mission awareness of the current robots, however, forced us to include a human-in-the-loop, creating a framework to control the robot using intuitive high-level commands.
In this work we developed a semi-autonomous, teleoperated framework with adjustable autonomy to control a humanoid robot in the disaster scenario that will be set up during the DRC.
Based on reactive, behavioral and symbolic control literature, we designed a library of motion primitives, i.e. symbolic high-level commands to be issued through a simple control interface and input devices (mouse or gamepad). Following the guidelines of the DRC, the interface has been designed to be usable by people with little to none robotics training.
The control interface has been tested on the COMAN humanoid robot in the demonstration of the valve task of the DRC, showing its effectiveness.