Overview of team ViGIR's approach to the Virtual Robotics Challenge

With the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a call to an ambitious multi-part competition was sent out to the robotics community. In this paper, we briefly summarize the approach for addressing the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) where software for control and supervision of a capable humanoid robot must be developed. Team ViGIR, comprising members from the US and Germany, leveraged previous robotics competition experience and a variety of open source tools, to achieve sixth place in the VRC out of 126 registrants, thereby advancing to the next round of the DRC and obtaining an Atlas robot.