Authr simulation view allows user to inspect the program constructed.
Authr setup view allows user to define Agents, Things, and Destinations.
Authr task view allows user to drag-and-drop Therbligs into tasks.
Authr simulation view allows user to inspect the program constructed.
Authr setup view allows user to define Agents, Things, and Destinations.
Authr
Authr was designed to enable engineers to develop collaborative tasks with better allocations for the agents involved. Users could take their existing work descriptions and convert it to a human robot collaborative process where the agent allocation was optimized by Authr. The interface consisted of three workflow phases: (1) Environment Setup, (2) Plan Description, (3) Simulation. We evaluated the user interface with a couple of user studies.
We already provide an extensive writeup on Github regarding the technical development. Additionally, checkout the paper here.
Primary Technical Contributions
My contributions tended toward backend ROS integration, robot simulation, and the data management service.
We used MoveIt to plan the robot's movements for Authr. A critical step was to wrap MoveIt's interface in order to compute and store the trajectories, check reach feasibility, and compute the time-of-flight table. Time-of-flight (ToF) is the time it takes for a robot agent to move between two user-defined destinations within the workspace. ToF's are critical for allocation in order to accurately allocate agents to specific Therbligs.
Second, the project required a data server that maintains the plan being designed. My responsibility was to assist in implementing the rules that maintained the data structure's relationships as users added/modified/deleted agents, things, destinations, therbligs, macros, and tasks.
Lastly, I worked a bit on the frontend interface. I worked mostly on implementing the frontend program model and its communication to the ROS infrastructure.