IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018 - 13

peripheral to the building, and 3) the indoor zone, where the
robot operates. The overall infrastructure was organized as
depicted in Figure 4(a)-(c). The components that belong to
the robot and operator are seen in Figure (a) and (c), respectively. Two Ethernet cables, one dedicated to the control data
and one dedicated to the vision data, have been connected to
two wireless routers, one near the pilot station and one near
the entrance of the building. In this way, the robot remotely
receives commands and sends the streaming visuals back to
the teleoperator.
Robot
For this mission, we developed a prototype robotic platform
based on the WALK-MAN technology [10] and on the specifications determined by the scenario requirements, listed in
Table 1. The robot consists of a wheeled base for better stability
and a humanoid upper body for visual inspection and manipulation task completion [Figure 4(b)]. The overall size of the
platform is crucial for this application due to the restricted
indoor passages. Moreover, it defines the mobility capabilities
of the robot. In particular, the width of its base determines the
minimum allowed corridor size, whereas its length affects the
turning radius of the mobile base. For these reasons, the robot
was provided with the smallest mobile base available on the

market and comparable with the upper-body weight and size.
Overall dimensions are reported in Figure 4(d).
The end-effectors are based on the Pisa/IIT SoftHand
[12], so that they increase the robustness, reliability, and
efficiency of the manipulation system while reducing its
mechanical and control complexity. Each end-effector is
equipped with six-axis force/torque sensors that provide
feedback for the manipulation tasks.
The exteroceptive visuThe overall size of the
al perception system of
the robot is a MultiSense
platform is crucial for this
SL [28] integrated in the
robotic head. It includes a
application due to the
stereo red, blue, and green
(RGB) camera, a rotating
restricted indoor passages.
two-dimensional (2-D)
lidar scanner, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor. We set the resolution of
the stereo camera to one megapixel for the RGB-depth
(RGB-D) data with an update rate of 15 Hz, and the laser
scanner returns 1,024 points at 60 Hz and rotates at 1 rad/s. A
ZED stereo camera [29] is placed on top of the robotic head
and returns images of the reconstructed 3-D environment to

Inside Outside

Pilot Station
100 m

Head
Orientation
from Operator

2

1

Operator Head
Orientation

Hands, Target
Pose, and
Closure from
Operator

Stereo Images

Wire
Wireless

3
4

Images
from Field
(a)

(b)

Operator Hands
Pose and
Closure
(c)

1,340

808

543

697

670

1,037

(d)

(e)

Figure 4. (a)-(c) The communication and control architecture scheme, (d) the robotic platform, based on the upper body of the
WALK-MAN robot, and (e) the remote pilot station.

september 2018

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018

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