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，以便在海洋环境中进行探索和测绘，因为海洋环境中的通信本身带宽很低，可能会由于自然海洋现象而退化甚至中断。这项研究的重点是在这种人类干预有限的条件下协调机器人和这类机器人的团队。预计从该项目中学到的原则将可推广到在具有类似通信挑战的恶劣环境中运行的协作机器人团队的部署，例如自然灾害后可能会发生的情况。该项目解决了机器人学习使用高级描述符来描述其环境的技术挑战，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，以保持所有合作机器人之间的描述模型一致。机器人使用这种高级场景描述来彼此高效地传达探索的状态，并尽可能地向人类操作员传达。此外，人类操作员可以通过根据这些学习的场景描述符来指定他们的兴趣，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化信息内容、人类兴趣和空间覆盖，同时考虑到在这种恶劣环境中通信范围施加的困难限制。

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.