Fast Perception, Planning, and Execution for a Robotic Butler: Wheeled Humanoid MHubo As the aging population grows at a rapid rate, there is an ever growing need for service robot platforms that can provide daily assistance at practical speed with reliable performance. In order to assist with daily tasks such as fetching a beverage, a service robot must be able to perceive its environment and generate corresponding motion trajectories. This becomes a challenging and computationally complex problem when the environment is unknown and thus the path planner must sample numerous trajectories that often are suboptimal, extending the execution time. To address this issue, we propose a unique strategy of integrating a 3D object detection pipeline with a kinematically optimal manipulation planner to significantly increase speed performance at runtime. In addition, we develop a new robotic butler system for a wheeled humanoid that is capable of fetching requested objects at 24% of the speed a human needs to fulfill the same task. The proposed system was evaluated and demonstrated in a realworld environment setup as well as in public exhibition.

Motion Generation Interface of ROS to PODO Software Framework for Wheeled Humanoid Robot This paper discusses the development of robot motion generation interface between a realtime software architecture and a nonrealtime robot operating system. In order for robots to execute intelligent manipulation or navigation, close integration of highlevel perception and lowlevel control is required. However, many available opensource perception modules are developed in ROS, which operates on Linux OS that donu0027t guarantee RT performance. This can lead to nondeterministic responses and stability problems that can adversely affect robot control. As a result, many robotic systems devote RTOS for lowlevel motion control. Similarly, the humanoid robot platform developed at KAIST, Hubo, utilizes a custom realtime software framework called PODO. Although PODO provides easy interface for motion generation, it lacks interface to highlevel frameworks such as ROS. As such, we present a new motion generation interface between ROS and PODO that enables users to generate motion trajectories through standard ROS messages while leveraging a realtime motion controller. With the proposed communication interface, we demonstrate series of manipulator tasks on the actual wheeled humanoid platform, MHubo. The overall communication interface responsiveness was at most 27 milliseconds.