Duncan Calvert

University of West Florida | UWF · School of Science and Engineering

Towards the role of humanoid robots as squad mates in urban operations and other domains, we identified doors as a major area lacking capability development. In this paper, we focus on the ability of humanoid robots to navigate and deal with doors. Human-sized doors are ubiquitous in many environment domains and the humanoid form factor is uniquely...

Teleoperation plays a crucial role in enabling robot operations in challenging environments, yet existing limitations in effectiveness and accuracy necessitate the development of innovative strategies for improving teleoperated tasks. This article introduces a novel approach that utilizes mixed reality and assistive autonomy to enhance the efficien...

Teleoperation of humanoid robots has long been a challenging domain, necessitating advances in both hardware and software to achieve seamless and intuitive control. This paper presents an integrated solution based on several elements: calibration-free motion capture and retargeting, low-latency fast whole-body kinematics streaming toolbox and high-...

Teleoperation plays a crucial role in enabling robot operations in challenging environments, yet existing limitations in effectiveness and accuracy necessitate the development of innovative strategies for improving teleoperated tasks. This article introduces a novel approach that utilizes mixed reality and assistive autonomy to enhance the efficien...

Humanoid robots have the potential to perform useful tasks in a world built for humans. However, communicating intention and teaming with a humanoid robot is a multi-faceted and complex problem. In this paper, we tackle the problems associated with quickly and interactively authoring new robot behavior that works on real hardware. We bring the powe...

We present a virtual reality (VR) framework designed to intuitively generate humanoid multi-contact maneuvers for use in unstructured environments. Our framework allows the operator to directly manipulate the inverse kinematics objectives which parameterize a trajectory. Kinematic objectives consisting of spatial poses, center-of-mass position and...

In trying to build humanoid robots that perform useful tasks in a world built for humans, we address the problem of autonomous locomotion. Humanoid robot planning and control algorithms for walking over rough terrain are becoming increasingly capable. At the same time, commercially available depth cameras have been getting more accurate and GPU com...

In this paper, we present our approach to achieve autonomous walking over complex terrain on the quadrupedal robot, LLAMA. LLAMA is a prototype robot designed by NASA Jet Propulsion Lab as part of the Army Research Laboratory’s Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance. One of the major objectives of this robot is to be capable of traversing compl...

This article presents a retrospective analysis of Team IHMC’s experience throughout the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), where we took first or second place overall in each of the three phases. As an extremely demanding challenge typical of DARPA, the DRC required rapid research and development to push the boundaries of robotics and set a new benchm...

This article presents a retrospective analysis of Team IHMC's experience throughout the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), where we took first or second place overall in each of the three phases. As an extremely demanding challenge typical of DARPA, the DRC required rapid research and development to push the boundaries of robotics and set a new benchm...