Advanced Programming and Teaching Interfaces for Autonomous System Control

Achieving robust autonomy by demonstration is challenging for several reasons. First, it is important to be able to provide demonstrations in a way that they capture the key aspects of robot interaction with environment. Second, the interface for providing demonstrations needs to be friendly enough for a non-technical user such as a Soldier. Third, it is critical to be able to verify the safety of the robot behavior given a demonstration. This requires the framework to simulate the key complexities such as dynamics of interaction. We propose to develop a ROS-based software architecture called User-friendly Safe Autonomy Framework for Robotics (USAF Robotics). It builds upon our existing work on an intuitive interface for web-based, teleoperation-based and kinesthetic demonstrations for mobile manipulators. It also extends it in several ways. First, it will allow users to annotate demonstrations with key complexities of interaction. Second, it will also allow users to verify the safety of the robot behavior under varying conditions after the demonstration is provided. Third, the framework will perform a selective simulation of key interaction complexities during the safety verification. With these extensions, the USAF Robotics will provide a universal tool for intuitive safety-oriented teaching of mobile manipulators and other robots.