RoMeLa is on a roll. This summer, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech, led by Dr. Dennis Hong, took home five major awards from the international robot soccer competition RoboCup 2011. The small humanoid robot DARwIn-OP that they developed won first place in the Kid Size league, and this open source robot is quickly gaining worldwide popularity. Their bigger bipedal robot CHARLI-2 won the Best Humanoid Award (Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup), making them the first U.S. team to win this title. Moreover, the group is now developing the world's first 2-legged fire fighting robot named SAFFiR for the Navy that will autonomously help humans put out fires on a ship. (The group is also developing a car for blind drivers, but we're going to save that for another story.) We asked Dr. Hong about the past, present and future of his group's humanoid robot research. (Photo credit: Virginia Tech)
Q. First I want to ask about your victory in the RoboCup Humanoid Kid-Size League with the DARwIn-OP. The match between you and the Darmstadt Dribblers was fascinating to watch. What do you think was the key to your victory?
A. Our kid size DARwIn team is a collaborative team between Virginia Tech and University of Pennsylvania. We at Virginia Tech (RoMeLa) are the experts on humanoid robots and system integration, and thus lead the platform development. Prof. Dan Lee at the University of Pennsylvania (GRASP), who is well known in the field of machine learning, and his team lead the software development. We had the best hardware platform with DARwIn-OP, so we decided to work with Dan to bring the best of software and the best of hardware together. It was a beautiful story of successful collaboration.
Photo: Team DARwIn at RoboCup 2011 (Credit: Virginia Tech)
We know DARwIn-OP's system inside out because we are the ones who developed it. When you develop software, you actually have to know a lot about the hardware. That’s the advantage we had over other teams.
Another reason for the success, I think, is that the DARwIn-OP is a brand new platform whereas for example the Darmstadt team has been using their platform for many years. So I think their platform is starting to see its age. So as you can see in the match, the first half and second half it was 5 to 5 and then after that, during the overtime, it looked like their hardware started to get tired. The motors overheat and then things get “shaky.”
Another interesting side note. I do know that a number of teams are very interested in DARwIn-OP and I believe they are planning to use DARwIn-OP as their platform for RoboCup 2012. This year, the Darmstadt team actually brought one DARwIn-OP unit and they used it in some of the earlier games. We could see that they were testing it. So technically we were not the only team that had DARwIn- OP at this year’s RoboCup.
Q. Can we step back to the beginning of this project? How and when did your research project on DARwIn-OP that was funded by NSF start? And how much was the grant?
A. The DARwIn project started in 2004 without any funding. When I first joined Virginia Tech, I had some startup funds so I started a miniature humanoid project. I’ve been interested in many types of locomotion. Leg-wheel hybrids, 6 legs, 3 legs…. So naturally the next step was to investigate 2 legged robots and I’ve been very interested in human locomotion. I thought the best way to study how humans walk is to build a humanoid robot and try to make it walk. And during that process we’ll get a better understanding about the dynamics and controls of human walking. Then in the future we will be able to use this knowledge to develop better prosthetic legs and those kind of things.
So that was my main reason I started the DARwIn project. We were NOT thinking about RoboCup at all at that time. And so DarWiN 0 was developed in 2004, in 2005 DARwIn 1, in 2006 DARwIn 2, and then around 2006 or 2007, Prof. Oskar von Stryk at Darmstadt Dribblers saw our robot and invited us to join RoboCup.
Once we started participating in RoboCup, DARwIn started to become popular. Many research laboratories and universities contacted us saying they wanted to use DARwIn for their research and educational tasks but as a university we couldn’t sell it. So I wrote a NSF research proposal with Prof. George Lee at Purdue University, asking that if you can give us the funds, we’ll develop an open source version of DARwIn and give it out to the universities so that we can contribute to the robotics community. We received a total of 1.2 million dollars for a 4 years project. We are in the second year right now.
DARwIn-Op is a fully open source robot which means that the software AND hardware are open source. All the CAD files, the blueprints and documentations on how to make and assemble it are all online for free, so other teams can build it. I already know that some groups are building the robot themselves, but you can also buy it from a company called ROBOTIS.
Q. The NSF grant is for Virginia Tech and Purdue University. How did you get to cooperate with Purdue?
A. I had been talking with Prof. George Lee about humanoid robots and we thought that we have a fantastic opportunity with our DARwIn series so it was an idea that we came up with together to write the proposal. Purdue’s role in the DARwIn project was to try to figure out what the community needs, to set the specifications and what the universities might be able to use it for different types of research. It can be used for network communications, vision processing, autonomous behaviors, locomotion, mobile manipulation - all the robotics disciplines that people are interested in. Then based on those specifications, we designed the hardware and electronics. We brought in Universtiy of Pennsylvania later on to get some help for the software.
Q. How did the company ROBOTIS get involved?
