Jonathan Brookshire
 

The goal of the Agile Robotics project was to build an autonomous forklift which could operate in an unprepared environment alongside humans. In addition to path planning, manipulation, and navigation capabilities, a major focus of this project was to interact with the human teammates in a predictable and safe manner. The video below shows a small portion of those capabilities: the ability of the robot to modulate its speed based on the terrain. Here, the robot passes over a small ramp in the road. Using its LIDARs to model the maximum safe speed, the forklift detects the upcoming ramp, slows as it passes over the ramp, and again increases it speed when safe. Essentially, the robot drives fast when it is safe to do so, and drives slowly when the terrain requires -- just as a human operator would expect it to.