General-purpose robots can perform a range of useful tasks in human environments; however, programming them to robustly function in all possible environments that they might encounter is unfeasible. Instead, our research aims to develop robots that can be programmed by its end-users in their context of use, so that the robot needs to robustly function in only one particular environment. This requires intuitive ways in which end-users can program their robot. To that end, this paper contributes a flow-based visual programming language, called RoboFlow, that allows programming of generalizable mobile manipulation tasks. RoboFlow is designed to (i) ensure a robust low-level implementation of program procedures on a mobile manipulator, and (ii) restrict the high-level programming as much as possible to avoid user errors while enabling expressive programs that involve branching, looping, and nesting. We present an implementation of RoboFlow on a PR2 mobile manipulator and demonstrate the generalizability and error handling properties of RoboFlow programs on everyday mobile manipulation tasks in human environments.

Check out the code in the RoboFlow repo, and try a demo in your browser!

1. Sonya Alexandrova
2. Zachary Tatlock
3. Maya Cakmak

Publications

Visual Robot Programming for Generalizable Mobile Manipulation Tasks
Sonya Alexandrova, Zachary Tatlock, and Maya Cakmak
HRI '15

RoboFlow: A Flow-based Visual Programming Language for Mobile Manipulation Tasks
Sonya Alexandrova, Zachary Tatlock, and Maya Cakmak
ICRA '15