On the Integration of Hardware-Abstracted Robot Skills for use in Industrial Scenarios

In this paper, we present a method for programming robust, reusable and hardware-abstracted robot skills. The goal of this work is to supply mobile robot manipulators with a library of skills that incorporate both sensing and action, which permit robot novices to easily reprogram the robots to perform new tasks, as well as provide a more clear mapping between human and robot actions. Critical to the success of this approach is the notion of hardware abstraction, that separates the skill level from the primitive level on specific systems. Leveraging a previously proposed architecture, we construct two complex skills by instantiating the necessary skill primitives on two very different mobile manipulators. The skills are parameterized by task level variables, such as object labels and environment locations, making re-tasking the skills by operators feasible.