A Web-Based Graphical User Interface for Programming Optimal Control Based Robot Motion Tasks

Abstract

The programming of complex tasks with robot manipulators faces the challenges of complying to constraints and needing to account for several, sometimes conflicting performance objectives. Optimal control problems (OCP) are able to explicitly account for these challenges by solving constrained optimization problems to find optimal trajectories that realize such tasks. The wide adoption of OCPs, however, is restricted by the high engineering cost and the high computational complexity associated to its implementation. To that end, in this paper we present a web application and graphical user interface (GUI) that acts as a front-end of Tasho, a toolbox for constrained-based task specification of robot motion tasks. This web application aims to lower the engineering complexity of setting, simulating and deploying a robot task by realizing a direct workflow from task definition on the GUI to deployment on a real robot using ROS. By interfacing state-of-the-art solvers and libraries through Tasho, the web application delivers computationally efficient solutions to the OCPs associated to the task.