So lately we have been making CoSTAR into a bigger, better, and more usable system, with all kinds of new capabilities.

One of the biggest things we have going on right now is an ongoing update of all the contents of the CoSTAR stack, the open source project containing all of our code. The UI is now a bit smother, SmartMove works better, and most of all we are continuing to work on support for ROS Kinetic and for the DVRK. Our testbed is still a dressed-up UR5, seen here:

We’ve been putting the system in the hands of ordinary, non-researcher people for one of the first times in quite a while. Our user interface is undergoing some refinements, but these days we’ve pretty much settled on using both RVIZ and a touchscreen-based UI for teaching the robot.

Take a look at the code if you are interested.

And all this stuff is in our paper:

@article{paxton2017costar,
  title={Co{STAR}: Instructing Collaborative Robots with Behavior Trees and Vision},
  author={Paxton, Chris and Hundt, Andrew and Jonathan, Felix and Guerin, Kelleher and Hager, Gregory D},
  journal={Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017 IEEE International Conference on (to appear)},
  note={Available as arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.06145},
  year={2017}
}

Which I’ll be presenting at ICRA this year.