Supervised Autonomy for Communication-degraded Subterranean Exploration by a Robot Team

Otsu, Kyohei; Tepsuporn, Scott; Thakker, Rohan; Vaquero, Tiago Stegun; Edlund, Jeffrey A.; Walsh, William E.; Miles, Gregory; Heywood, Tristan; Wolf, Michael; Agha–mohammadi, Ali–akbar

doi:10.1109/aero47225.2020.9172537

Cited by 47 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Multi-agent communication systems have been considered in various domains in robotics, including cooperative exploration [6], collaborative SLAM [9], [10], and ad-hoc communication infrastructure building [11]. However, it is still challenging to maintain a reliable system under harsh realworld constraints.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another approach is to use a bridge between different ROS master networks. The bridge can be implemented in various ways depending on its networking requirements, including Data Distribution Service (DDS) [21], ZeroMQ [22], custom UDP and TCPbased protocols [23], [6].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We first discuss the migration effort from our previous ROS 1-based approach [6], focusing on added functionalities, development, and maintenance cost. The previous approach, which was used for a similar four-robot system during the DARPA SubT Challenge Tunnel Circuit in August 2019, used the popular multimaster_fkie package [20] and a custom cross-master messaging mechanism.…”

Section: A Upgrading From Ros 1 Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…environments [6]. We assume a system of multiple capable robots generating megabytes of environmental data per minute.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

Ginting

Otsu

Edlund

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A well-structured and reliable networking is key to the successful operations of autonomous multi-robot systems. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a multi-robot networking architecture CHORD (Collaborative High-bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables) based on two popular robotics middleware, ROS 1 and ROS 2. We discuss the benefit and best practices of combining two different frameworks that share the same spirit and show its performance from large-scale real-world experiments. The proposed system is developed as part of Team CoSTAR's effort for the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. 2 The system has been fieldproved and demonstrated in the Urban Circuit event, where team CoSTAR won first place. To our knowledge, this work is the first real-world demonstration of a ROS 2-based multi-robot system in such large-scale extreme environments. From the significant improvement of the communication performance and the ease of transition from existing ROS 1 systems, this work encourages wider adoption of ROS 2 in field robotics applications.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Upgrading From Ros 1 Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…environments [6]. We assume a system of multiple capable robots generating megabytes of environmental data per minute.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

Ginting

Otsu

Edlund

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We will briefly discuss the planning modules in Sections V and VI. The communication block is responsible for enabling data exchange between multiple robots and a base station (described in [18]).…”

Section: Nebula Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomous Spot: Long-Range Autonomous Exploration of Extreme Environments with Legged Locomotion

Bouman

Ginting

Alatur

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Self Cite

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper serves as one of the first efforts to enable large-scale and long-duration autonomy using the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. Motivated by exploring extreme environments, particularly those involved in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, this paper pushes the boundaries of the state-ofpractice in enabling legged robotic systems to accomplish realworld complex missions in relevant scenarios. In particular, we discuss the behaviors and capabilities which emerge from the integration of the autonomy architecture NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy) with next-generation mobility systems. We will discuss the hardware and software challenges, and solutions in mobility, perception, autonomy, and very briefly, wireless networking, as well as lessons learned and future directions. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed solutions on physical systems in real-world scenarios. 3 The proposed solution contributed to winning 1st-place in the 2020 DARPA Subterranean Challenge, Urban Circuit. 4

show abstract

Mixed‐Integer Motion Planning for Nonholonomic Robots Under Visible Light Communication Constraints

Caregnato‐Neto,

Maximo,

Afonso

2024

Optim Control Appl Methods

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This work is concerned with the problem of motion planning for a group of nonholonomic robots under Visible Light Communication (VLC) connectivity requirements. Recently, multi‐robot systems operating with VLC networks have been demonstrated as an attractive solution for inspection tasks in pipelines and underground facilities. However, there are still no established methodologies to automate their operation. We address this problem with an optimization framework based on Mixed‐Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to design a motion planner that safely coordinates the robot team while jointly addressing the nonlinearity of the robots' dynamics, the directed line‐of‐sight requirement for VLC connections, and the connectivity maintenance of the ensuing directed networks. We propose a novel method to encode the nonlinear dynamics of nonholonomic robots into the MILP formulation and demonstrate through comparative trials that, although the resulting optimization search space is more restricted, the approach still outperforms mixed‐integer nonlinear programming in terms of optimization time and solution quality. The efficacy of the proposal is also demonstrated through realistic simulations of the Turtlebot3 robot platform.

show abstract

Supervised Autonomy for Communication-degraded Subterranean Exploration by a Robot Team

Cited by 47 publications

References 9 publications

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

Autonomous Spot: Long-Range Autonomous Exploration of Extreme Environments with Legged Locomotion

Mixed‐Integer Motion Planning for Nonholonomic Robots Under Visible Light Communication Constraints

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About