Getting Started with the BYU Robot Team

Thanks for choosing to join the research effort with the BYU Robot Team in the CS department.

Our research focus is in Human-Robot Interaction. More specifically:

How can a robot and human work together in situations where there are conflicts of interest?

We are also part of a Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) that is investigating proficiency self-assessment. So another goal of our project is to answer the following question:

How do you make a robotic system able to recognize any potential issues that may arise to prevent it from proceeding?

In the course of working on our team, you will probably be assigned tasks to address both of these research questions.

Robotic System

In order to facilitate this research, we work with the Sawyer Robot from Rethink Robotics. We call the robot Tibor.

Rethink Robotics went out of business soon after we got Tibor. So we don't have much support / documentation from the company. Fortunately we haven't run into too much trouble.

For everyone joining the team, you probably should get familiar with the basics of working with the physical robot which are detailed in Sawyer.

You should also get familiar with the software we use to control the robot (ROS) or Robot Operating System. It is not really an OS, but rather a framework that allows multiple processes to all coordinate and work together to accomplish something. Each process is called a ROS Node and can send messages to each other on different ROS Topics to coordinate activities.

Go through the documentation at Ros to familiarize yourself with ROS. Feel free to ask any more clarifying questions.

UI

In order to work on the various UI components for our system (e.g. Faces, ControlPanel, ControlUI, Speech App, Documentation Site, SSharp Games) you will have to get familiar with Dart & Flutter.

So if you will be working on / with UI, or are interested in learning Flutter please go to the doucmentation on that. [Flutter] For the faces you will need to be familiar with rive.app and will need to be familiar with that. These tutorials will be helpfull. Tutorials

User Studies

When we start a user study, we will need you to complete the IRB (Instutional Review Board) certification. It involves learning about procedures required for dealing with User Studies and gathering data from people.

Accounts

There are a few accounts that you need to have / or be aware of.

Personal Accounts

• GitHub account github.com
  • You will need to add an ssh key to your account: adding ssh key. We typically use the RSA key.
• Computer account
• Slack account
  • Ask Tim to add you to the BYU Robotics Slack
  • This is our main method of communicating when someone isn't in the lab.
• Google Account
  • Ask for Tim to share with you the folders
  • We use Google Drive for documents, spreadsheets / presentations
  • We use this documentation site for more general documentation
• BYU Box Account
  • Ask for Tim to share with you the folders
  • We use Box for anything else, (large zip files, pdfs, videos etc)

Common Accounts

There is a sawyer robot gmail. sawyer.game.bot@gmail.com.

There is typically a shared account on some computers.