1. Introduction

1.1. What is CRTK

CRTK (Collaborative Robotics Toolkit) is primarily a convention for command names and payloads used in robotics.

It is not necessary for robots to support all the CRTK commands, but if a command is implemented, it should adhere to this convention for the command name and payload. The API does not require any specific programming language nor middleware. As such the Robot Operating System (ROS) is not required, but the equivalent ROS service/topic name and message type are included since it is our primary development environment.

1.2. Use cases

The initial use cases were motivated by the Raven II and da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), which are telerobotic systems primarily used for research in medical applications. However, it also encompasses teleoperation or cooperative (hands-on) control of other robot systems, including typical industrial robots. It is not intended for mobile robots. Typical use cases include:

  • Teleoperation with or without force feedback, using any input device (leader) to teleoperate any follower robot

    • Teleoperation over high-speed links, for example when leader and follower are controlled from same computer or from computers with high-speed local connection

    • Teleoperation with lower-quality channels, such as over the Internet. These may have lower bandwidth and/or significant latency.

  • Autonomous (CNC-style) motion on the follower robot

  • Virtual fixtures on the leader robot

1.3. Supported devices

This is a non-exhaustive list of devices with CRTK interfaces. The devices with a cisstMultiTask interface rely on the ROS1 bridge or ROS2 bridge to provide the ROS interface.