Carrying objects with two agents?

[NikkiBouman]

What is your question? Is it possible to have a human and an agent carry an object together?

I am currently not using MATRX, but exploring whether I should. A human and an agent carrying an object/item together is a big part of my experiment, which is why I need this to be an option.

To what is your question related?

• [ ] I am not sure if I should use MATRX.
• [ ] I don't know how to do something with MATRX.

[thaije]

Hi Nikki, good to hear about the interest! The short answer is: no that is not possible, but you can make it look like they are carrying an object together.

Long answer: Technically it is not possible, but what we did in a TNO project was to have e.g. only the human carry the object, change the image of that human to make it look like the human + robot are carrying an object (see the image below, where it looks like the human and robot are carrying a human victim), and then make the robot invisible.

In this case, the human has full control over where to go, and once you drop the victim you were carrying, the robot is teleported to that position and made visible again, and the human has its image changed back to the regular image. So from the test subject's perspective it looks like the robot and human carry an object together, but in reality it is only one of the two.

You can also do this the other way around, where the human is made invisible, and the robot is in control of where to carry the object "together" with the human.

Doing it this way when carrying the object "together" either the robot or human is in full control of where to go. If that is not what you want, and you want them to be able to both give input on where to go, it might also be possible but that would require some more details on what you want to achieve exactly.

It does require some programming though because its not a default action of MATRX. However, we already fixed this for a TNO project so we have some example code lying around.

Does that answer your question?

[NikkiBouman]

Hi Tjalling,

Thank you for your quick response!

This definitely helps. I would only need the human to take control, so I feel like your suggestion might be a good solution. Could you point me to the example code in which you used MATRX like this?

[thaije]

Hi Nikki, the example code for the carrying together is part of a big complex task, so to make it easier I will make a tutorial tomorrow on how to have an agent and robot carry an object together in MATRX. I'll post an update here when it's done.

In the meantime you can get started with MATRX if you want:

• I would recommend checking out the basic tutorials here.
  • "The basics" tutorial explains the basics such as how to install and run MATRX, and how to create a world.
  • The second "A block world" tutorial introduces the block world 4 teams task. We didn't get to completing the tutorial for that yet, but it is available and you can run it and check the code to see how it works:
    • You can run the BW4T task by copy pasting this main.py and running it.
• Finally, there is a more detailed technical documentation on all components of MATRX available here

I'll also put up a tutorial tomorrow on how to create a custom (human)agent as well, as you'll most likely need that as well.

If you miss any other info, please let me know.

[NikkiBouman]

Hi Tjalling,

Thank you. I will get started with MATRX today.

[thaije]

Hi @NikkiBouman, sorry for the delay, things took longer then expected. Hereby a link to the tutorial: https://matrx-software.com/docs/how-to/carrying-an-object-together/ And the accompanying code: https://github.com/matrx-software/matrx-tutorials/tree/master/carry-object-together

Hope it helps!