Team VALOR's ESCHER: A Novel Electromechanical Biped for the DARPA Robotics Challenge
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 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 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 that are critical for transitioning research contributions to a fielded robot. Empirical data collected before, during, and after the DRC Finals validate ESCHER's performance in fielded environments.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 27, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1002/rob.21697
Entities
People
- Alexander Leonessa
- Brian Lattimer
- Chris Nogales
- Coleman Knabe
- Eric Hahn
- Graham Cantor‐cooke
- Graham Day
- Jackson Newton
- Jacob Webb
- James Burton
- Jason Ziglar
- John C. Peterson
- John Seminatore
- Jordan Neal
- Lakshitha Dantanarayana
- Michael D Hopkins
- Michael Rouleau
- Nikolaus Wittenstein
- Oliver Ebeling‐koning
- Robert G. Griffin
- Tomonari Furukawa
- Viktor Orekhov
- Yoonchang Sung
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Office of Naval Research
- University of Technology Sydney