NRI: INT: Co-Multi-Robotic Exploration of the Benthic Seafloor - New Methods for Distributed Scene Understanding and Exploration in the Presence of Communication Constraints

该项目解决了水下机器人之间的控制和通信，以在海洋环境中进行探索和绘制地图，在海洋环境中，通信固有的低带宽，可能会由于自然海洋现象而降级甚至中断。研究的重点是在这种条件下，在有限的人为干预下协调机器人及其合作团队。预计从该项目中学到的原则将推广到在恶劣环境中进行协作的机器人团队的部署，这些团队面临着类似的通信挑战，例如在自然灾害之后可能会遇到的问题。该项目解决了机器人使用高级描述符学习描述环境的技术挑战，使用最先进的无监督机器学习技术，并相互交换紧凑的消息，以保持所有协作机器人之间描述模型的一致性。这种高级场景描述被机器人用来有效地相互沟通探索状态，并尽可能地与人类操作员沟通。此外，人类操作员可以根据这些学习到的场景描述符指定他们的兴趣，从而有效地控制机器人团队。自动生成的探索轨迹旨在最大限度地提高信息内容、人类兴趣和空间覆盖范围，同时考虑到恶劣环境下通信范围所带来的困难限制。

This project addresses the control and communications among underwater robotic vehicles to explore and map in ocean environments, where the communications are inherently low bandwidth, may be degraded and even disrupted due to natural ocean phenomena. The research focuses on coordinating robots and cooperating teams of such robots under such conditions with limited human intervention. It is expected the principles learned from this project will be generalizable to deployment of teams of cooperating robots operating in harsh environments with similar communication challenges such as what might be expected in the aftermath of natural disasters. The project addresses technical challenges with robots learning to describe their environment using high-level descriptors, using state of the art unsupervised machine learning techniques, and exchanging compact messages with each other to keep the description model consistent across all the cooperating robots. This high-level scene description is used by the robots to efficiently communicate the state of the exploration to each other, and to the human operator as possible. Furthermore, the human operators can efficiently control the robot team by specifying their interests in terms of these learned scene descriptors. The automatically generated exploration trajectories aim to maximize the information content, human interest, and spatial coverage, while taking into account the difficult constraints imposed by communication range in such harsh environments.