An interactive tool for designing complex robot motion patterns

Low-cost robots with a large number of degrees of freedom are becoming increasingly popular, nevertheless their programming is still a domain for experts. This paper introduces the Kouretes Motion Editor (KME), a freely-available interactive software tool for designing complex motion patterns on robots with many degrees of freedom using intuitive means. KME allows for a TCP/IP connection to a real or simulated robot, over which various robot poses can be communicated to or from the robot and manipulated locally using the KME graphical user interface. This portability and flexibility enables the user to work under different modes, with different robots, using different host machines. KME is originally designed for the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot which features a total of 21 degrees of freedom, but can be easily customized for other robots. KME has been employed successfully by Kouretes, the RoboCup team of the Technical University of Crete, for designing various special actions at the RoboCup 2008 competition (Standard Platform League).