CAREER: Topological Planning in Information Space for Intelligent Robotic Systems

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This project envisions mobile robotic systems capable of retrieving streaming information about any physical location in the world for the benefit of scientists, first responders, and the general public. In the past decade, a number of marine and aerial systems have emerged in applications such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, surveillance, and scientific exploration. However, currently an operator either teleoperates these vehicles directly or pre-specifies waypoint locations in a fixed plan. These approaches lead to severely limited performance by restricting the capabilities of robotic vehicles to (1) continue operating effectively as their environment, mission, and teammates change and (2) incorporate high-level goals given by human operators. This project seeks to bridge the gap between current systems that naively follow waypoints and intelligent systems capable of adapting to their environment, their team's capabilities, and to the goals of the operator. The ultimate objective of this project is to develop topological planning techniques based on homotopy and persistent homology that reason over a compact semantic representation of environmental conditions (e.g., informative areas, disturbances, and risky areas). By reasoning over concise semantic maps, the proposed methods will enable teams of autonomous vehicles to make decisions regarding information collection, cost minimization, and goal achievement in the physical world. The developed algorithms will be made publicly available through open source distribution and transitioned to field tests through ongoing collaborations with ocean scientists. The educational component of this project will integrate robotic vehicle planning into the graduate curriculum at Oregon State University through a Marine Robotics Certificate program and into Oregon high schools through an underwater robot programming module designed by the Oregon State University undergraduate Robotics Club.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.