Intern Challenge – Summer 2009 – Team Two

Personal Waiter
User Manual

“What would
you like to
drink today?”

powered by
 Congratulations..
You have just received your new PR2 household
robot. This manual gives you a short introduction on
how to use it properly.
 Today on the menu
PR2 serves a wide variety of different fruit juice
flavors and other beverages. Use your phone to
select your favorite drink.
A robot in your kitchen
Your new robot loves your kitchen,
and will get along in it perfectly. In
its daily routine, it will walk around,
find people it can deliver drinks to,
and clean up empty bottles left on
the bar and tables.

waypoints

drink pantry

cleaned tables

trash bin
 Robot Psychology
By hearsay described as an inexplicable
mystery, a robot’s mind is very simple. In fact,
the waiter robot only thinks about serving drinks
and cleaning tables.

Dispose bottle
Move to trashcan
Pick bottle
Serve drink
Find empty bottle
Find drink
Clean table
Pick drink
Find person
Deliver drink
 Components
• Mapping, Localization & Navigation
• Object detection
• Arm Controllers
• People detection
• Text-to-speech user feedback
• Phone/web interface
• Executive
• Teleoperation fallback
– State inspection & override
– Base control using joystick
– Arm control using spacenav
 Mapping & Localization

• Initial map created using

GMapping
• Map manually optimized
and annotated
• AMCL (Adaptive Monte-Carlo
Localization) from ROS
NavStack
 Navigation

• Using global and local planners from the ROS

NavStack
 Object detection

• Table detection and removal

• Point cloud clustering
• 3D Chamfer matching on point clusters
 Arm control

• Cartesian wrench controller

• Smooth spline trajectory generation
• Collision avoidance using joint constraints
• Automatic hand-off detection
 Web interface
• Django webserver
• HTTP POST requests from ROS nodes
• http://vm6.willowgarage.com:8080/intern
 Text-to-speech

• Using festival tts engine

• Verbalizes state transitions from executive
 Executive

• State machine
• Calls ROS services and actions
• Failures result in fallback to tele-operation state
• Manual state override at all times (preempts all
running actions)
 Warranty Disclaimer
After thorough testing, we have found that certain
activities might be harmful to the robot. Therefore,
you will lose your warranty, if you
• svn up
• modify the interior of your kitchen
• use the robot to grasp glass
• run the batteries empty
• add anti-drip cover sheets
• turn off main power to the robot
• spawn malicious nodes on the robot’s roscore
• run out of drinks
Customer Support
Mrinal Kalakrishnan
Arm control and motion planning
University of Southern California
kalakris@willowgarage.com

Jürgen Sturm
Mapping and documentation
University of Freiburg
sturm@willowgarage.com

Alex Sorokin
Tele-operation on demand
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
sorokin@willowgarage.com

Ian Goodfellow
Web interfaces and databases
Stanford Univeristy
goodfellow@willowgarage.com

Marius Muja
Object detection and pose registration
University of British Columbia
mariusm@willowgarage.com