Approach of Team SNU to the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals

This paper presents the technical approaches including the system architecture and the controllers that have been used by Team SNU at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals 2015. The platform THORMANG we used is a modular humanoid robot developed by ROBOTIS. On top of this platform, Team SNU developed the iris camera module and the end effector with passive palm in order to increase success rate of the tasks at the DRC Finals. Also, we developed the software architecture to operate the robot intuitively, in spite of degraded communication. The interface enables operator to select sensor data to be communicated during each task. These efforts on the hardware and the software reduce operation time of the tasks, and increase reliability of the robot. Finally, the controllers for THORMANG were developed to consider stability as the first priority, because the humanoid robot for rescue should perform complex tasks in unexpected environments. The proposed approaches were verified at the DRC Finals 2015, where Team SNU ranked 12th place out of 23 teams.