Taking Recoveries to Task: Recovery-Driven Development for Recipe-based Robot Tasks
This addresses robustness in robot systems for developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing hierarchical and iterative methods.
The paper tackles the fragility of robot task execution in real-world environments by introducing Recovery-Driven Development (RDD), an iterative scripting process that separates nominal task and recovery development, validated by winning the FetchIt! Challenge at IEEE ICRA 2019.
Robot task execution when situated in real-world environments is fragile. As such, robot architectures must rely on robust error recovery, adding non-trivial complexity to highly-complex robot systems. To handle this complexity in development, we introduce Recovery-Driven Development (RDD), an iterative task scripting process that facilitates rapid task and recovery development by leveraging hierarchical specification, separation of nominal task and recovery development, and situated testing. We validate our approach with our challenge-winning mobile manipulator software architecture developed using RDD for the FetchIt! Challenge at the IEEE 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. We attribute the success of our system to the level of robustness achieved using RDD, and conclude with lessons learned for developing such systems.