Bibliography

Please cite the following references if you use FlexBE in your research project:

Philipp Schillinger, Stefan Kohlbrecher, and Oskar von Stryk, “Human-Robot Collaborative High-Level Control with Application to Rescue Robotics”, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Stockholm, Sweden, 2016, pp. 2796-2802, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487442.

Joshua Zutell, David C. Conner and Philipp Schillinger, “ROS 2-Based Flexible Behavior Engine for Flexible Navigation”, IEEE SoutheastCon 2022, Mobile, AL, USA, 2022, pp. 674-681, doi: 10.1109/SoutheastCon48659.2022.9764047.

@conference{schillinger2016flexbe,
  author={Schillinger, Philipp and Kohlbrecher, Stefan and von Stryk, Oskar},
  booktitle={2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  title={Human-robot collaborative high-level control with application to rescue robotics},
  year={2016},
  pages={2796-2802},
  doi={10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487442}
}

@conference{zutell2022ros,
  author={Zutell, Joshua M. and Conner, David C. and Schillinger, Philipp},
  booktitle={SoutheastCon 2022},
  title={ROS 2-Based Flexible Behavior Engine for Flexible Navigation},
  year={2022},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={674-681},
  keywords={Protocols;Navigation;Operating systems;Collaboration;Automata;User interfaces;Systems support},
  doi={10.1109/SoutheastCon48659.2022.9764047}
}

The following publications describe the higher-level significance of FlexBE and “Collaborative Autonomy” in robotic behavior development:

Romay, A., Kohlbrecher, S., Stumpf, A., von Stryk, O., Maniatopoulos, S., Kress-Gazit, H., Schillinger, P. and Conner, D.C. (2017), “Collaborative Autonomy between High-level Behaviors and Human Operators for Remote Manipulation Tasks using Different Humanoid Robots”, J. Field Robotics, 34: 333-358.

Kohlbrecher S, Stumpf A, Romay A, Schillinger P, von Stryk O and Conner DC (2016) “A Comprehensive Software Framework for Complex Locomotion and Manipulation Tasks Applicable to Different Types of Humanoid Robots”, Front. Robot. AI 3:31. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00031

FlexBE, initially conceived as an extension to ROS 1 SMACH, was developed by Philipp Schillinger at Technische Universität Darmstadt in support of Team ViGIR in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) from 2012-2015. The main parts of the internal operator interaction concepts, especially the Autonomy Level for adapting to uncertain situations and the usage of a remote behavior mirror for bandwidth efficiency, were developed as part of Schillinger’s 2013 Bachelor’s Thesis. The concepts were further refined into FlexBE during Schillinger’s Master’s Thesis in 2015, and released publicly for ROS 1.

The main goal of FlexBE was to provide a way for a non-developer operator to make adjustments to behaviors during runtime in situations where the exact scenario the robot will be facing is not known in advance. The extensive user interface supports behavior creation and runtime modification to reduce the cognitive load on the operator while the robot is in the field, and reduce sources for possible errors by running verification checks and automatically generating syntax-error-free code. See Chapter 3 of Schillinger’s Master’s Thesis for more details.

Philipp Schillinger, “Development of an Operator Centric Behavior Control Approach for a Humanoid Robot”, BSc thesis, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 2013.
Philipp Schillinger, “An Approach for Runtime-Modifiable Behavior Control of Humanoid Rescue Robots”, MSc thesis, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 2015.