Humanoids SIG

I’m looking to start a SIG for developers working with Humanoids in ROS. Each year we have more humanoids available in both Gazebo and commercial platforms, but we still don’t have a widely adopted framework like MoveIt or Navigation.

Some of the needs include:

  • ROS Control hardware interfaces for more humanoid platforms
  • Balancing and walking controllers for position and torque controlled robots (in ROS Control)
  • Footstep odometry
  • Terrain mapping
  • Efficient tree-based IK with flexible constraint types
  • Footstep and multi-contact planning / re-planning

Are others interested in working with me on this? If so, lets make ROSCon 2017 a starting point.

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I’m in.
ros_control needs to get beyond the basics that it has now. I know it is
used on many humanoid platforms but so far we haven’t had any request on
adding stuff for humanoids into ros_control.

Although I can’t dedicate time to development, taking part in discussion
and reviewing these additions is something I can squeeze in.

What do specific needs do you have in mind for hardware interfaces?

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I’m interested. I have developed a constraint- and optimization-based whole-body control framework for PR2-like robots in beta stage, for which I want to find more users.

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Hi,
during the last years some teams of the RoboCup Humanoid League started to use ROS. There are multiple code bases available and also some papers were released on this topic.
I am involved in this league and can maybe provide information or connection to developers which are using ROS currently on humanoid robots.
My master’s thesis which I just finished presents how ROS is currently used in this league. If you are interested, you can find it here: https://tams.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/2017/MSc_Marc_Bestmann.pdf
I am generally interested in this topic and I would like to provide help if I can.

2 Likes

@bmagyar Great! Many humanoids use cascade control schemes that aren’t handled (to my knowledge) by ros_control. For hardware interfaces, we may want to initially focus on a couple of widespread core robot platforms for which we can provide ros_control hardware abstraction. There have been a few non-ROS humanoid frameworks that have demonstrated common walking controllers across multiple platforms.

@airballking Can you provide a link to your WBC framework?

@SammyRamone RoboCup, both soccer and rescue leagues, may be a community where we can get the most initial traction. However, we’ll need to be careful to make sure our stack supports RoboCup without loss of generality.

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@dkotfis Sure. The framework is called giskard and you can find the various repositories in this github organization: https://github.com/semroco

A good working example of upper-body control that uses the robot Boxy of our group can found here: https://github.com/SemRoCo/giskard_boxy Following the install instructions, you can see the robot in simulation with interactive markers to pull the end-effectors.

I apologize for the sparse documentation. Please do not hesitate to file issues for questions or bugs.

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I also think that RoboCup can provide some traction to this. Afterall, there are not many places where so many different humanoid robots are in use. Things which are specific to RoboCup can be handled in additional packages.
Regarding the hardware: In the league, almost only Dynamixel Servos are used with controller boards like the Robotis CM730.

Hi,
at PAL Robotics we are highly interested in this topic.
We made contribution to ros_control and we are using it in all our robot platforms (TIAGo, REEM-C, TALOS).
We have published the simulation model and packages of our bipeds and we’d like to have the possibility to include some more advanced controllers and functionalities.

+1.

I’ve been working with different kind of humanoids (PAL’s robots, Bioloid, Aldebaran/Softbank’s robots and some others in simulation) and I’m also involved in the Robocup scene.

@lucamarchionni It looks like your group has fully adopted ros_control for REEM-C’s walking controller, which makes it a great candidate platform for the SIG. Do you have any architectural documentation for your system interfaces? That would give us a good starting point for discussion.

If Robotis motors are the standard in RoboCup, ROBOTIS-OP may be another good platform of focus.

I will start a mailing group and wiki page for our discussions.

@dkotfis We’re encouraging SIGs to use categories here on ROS Discourse.

Can you create an official request in the Site Feedback Category to start a meta thread about creating the category.

Since you’ve already got interest from several people I don’t expect any objections, but it’s good to have the request thread to discuss the naming, scoping, and category summary etc.

Hey,

we are working with THORMANG since the beginning. We’ve got already a lot of ROS-Software out which have been already used partly during the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Please check our organizations at Github: https://github.com/thor-mang and https://github.com/team-vigir/.

For footstep planning, we’ve already fully open-sourced our 3D Planner: http://wiki.ros.org/vigir_footstep_planning

In my opinion, a Humanoids SIG is a very nice idea, as still many software/approaches are not that easy to reuse for different humanoid robots as they probably could.

Best

Hi everyone, we’ve followed up with the proposal

And the category is not active.

Please help get the discussion started.

A post was split to a new topic: JSK’s use of humanoids