Abstract
With ArmarX we introduce a robot programming environment that has been developed in order to ease the realization of higher level capabilities needed by complex robotic systems such as humanoid robots. ArmarX is built upon the idea that consistent disclosure of the system state strongly facilitates the development process of distributed robot applications. We show the applicability of ArmarX by introducing a robot architecture for a humanoid system and discuss essential aspects based on an exemplary pick and place task. With several tools that are provided by the ArmarX framework, such as graphical user interfaces (GUI) or statechart editors, the programmer is enabled to efficiently build and inspect component based robotics software systems.
Funding statement: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 270273 (Xperience) and grant agreement no 611832 (WALK-MAN), and from the German Research Foundation (DFG: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre “Invasive Computing” (SFB/TR 89).
About the authors
Nikolaus Vahrenkamp received his Diploma and Ph.D. degrees from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in 2005 and 2011, respectively. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and works on software development, grasping and mobile manipulation for the humanoid robots of the ARMAR family. From 2011 to 2012, he was postdocoral researcher at the Cognitive Humanoids Lab of the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where he worked on grasp and motion planning for the humanoid robot iCub. Nikolaus Vahrenkamp is the author of over 40 technical publications, proceedings and book chapters. His research interests include humanoid robots, motion planning, grasping and sensor-based motion execution.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T), Adenauerring 2, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Mirko Wächter received the diploma degree in computer science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany in 2011. He is currently a doctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where he is a member of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies lab. His major research interests are physical robot interaction, robot cooperation with humans or other robots, motion synthesis and robotic software development.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T), Adenauerring 2, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Manfred Kröhnert received the diploma degree in computer science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2010. He is currently a doctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where he is a member of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies lab. His research interests include hardware/software architectures for humanoid robots, especially profiling and modeling of behavior and resource demands of robot programs.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T), Adenauerring 2, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Kai Welke received the diploma degree in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany in 2005 and his PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2011. His research interests include active vision and scene exploration for humanoid robots.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T), Adenauerring 2, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Tamim Asfour is full Professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is head of the Humanoid Robotics Systems Chair, High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T). His current research interest is high performance humanoid robotics. He is developer and leader of the development team of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been active in the field of Humanoid Robotics for the last 14 years resulting in about 150 peer-reviewed publications with focus on engineering complete humanoid robot systems including humanoid mechatronics and mechano-informatics, grasping and dexterous manipulation, action learning from human observation, goal-directed imitation learning, active vision and active touch, whole-body motion planning, system integration, robot software and hardware control architecture. He received his diploma degree in Electrical Engineering in 1994 and his PhD in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of Karlsruhe.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H2T), Adenauerring 2, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank all members and students of the Humanoids group at KIT for their various contributions to this work.
©2015 Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
