Advanced planning capabilities for robots in microgravity environments

We propose to develop a new software product called MoveIt Studio that provides supervised autonomy capabilities. It is a premium add-on for MoveIt, our current Open Source offering. MoveIt Studionbsp;enables an operator to command and controlnbsp;one or more robots through an easy-to-use, no-code interface. Operators can easily perform routine operations through a library of predefined objectives. Our system automatically takes an objective, composed of a series of tasks, and computes feasible motion plans, startingnbsp;from the current state of the environment. This plan is continuously updated as changes in the environment are observed by the robot. MoveIt Studio also offers more direct control of a robot through several manual modes. The manual modes range from directly controlling joints to controlling end effector poses to a ldquo;point-and-clickrdquo; affordance-based interface. The key innovations of the proposed work are the creation of a library of parameterized, reusable tasks that can be composed to solve more complex tasks. The user interface supports on-the-flynbsp;creation of new objectives composed of such tasks. Another key innovation is the combination of a spectrum of autonomous control methods that enables operators to easily switch between different desired/required levels of human supervision.