Systems for Synthesizing and Studying Robot Motion

Abstract

o We describe and detail two systems developed by the University of Wisconsin?Madison Graphics Group and Human- Computer Interaction lab designed to synthesize robot arm motion and evaluate human-robot collaborative performance. STrOBE is a general purpose robot trajectory optimizer. STrOBE optimizes a motion objective subject to a set of robot or environmental constraints using a nonlinear solver. RobotSim is an experimentation system implemented as a game. RobotSim measures the human-robot collaborative performance of robot arm motions. These systems have been developed with the intent of being released as open source software. We hope that releasing this software to the scientific community encourages further exploration of human-robot collaboration. This report serves as a resource for anyone looking to get started using these systems or looking for ideas for their own software.