CCRI: Planning: Infrastructure for Collaborative Autonomy Testing

自主地面机器人和无人驾驶车辆团队将被用于搜救、采矿、物资搬运和保护安全设施等任务。计算机科学家和工程师正在发明和增强新的算法，这些自主系统将使用这些算法来相互协作。更好的算法将提高团队绩效。目前，测试这类算法需要大量的时间和资源来建立和运行仿真模型以及测试和评估、确认和验证所需的其他设施。该项目将为建模和仿真基础设施奠定基础，该基础设施将减少自主系统研究和开发的障碍，并将使这一重要研究领域的合作成为可能。这将加速这些系统的实施，这些系统将给社会带来许多好处。这个项目将规划一个社区研究基础设施。规划过程将包括一个由来自多个机构的研究人员组成的广泛社区，其中包括机器人系统、建模和仿真、测试与评估以及软件工程方面的专家，并将以多种方式与他们接触。规划小组将开发用例、设计基础设施架构并确定关键合作伙伴。一个更广泛的小组将通过调查和机器人会议的研讨会提供意见。该规划项目的最终成果将是将于2022年1月提交的一份提案。基础设施将包括硬件、软件、API、用户界面、模型库、开发和测试环境以及文档。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Teams of autonomous ground robots and unmanned vehicles will be used in missions such as search-and-rescue, mining, material handling, and protecting secure facilities. Computer scientists and engineers are inventing and enhancing new algorithms that these autonomous systems will use to collaborate with each other. Better algorithms will improve team performance. Currently, testing such algorithms requires extensive time and resources to setup and run simulation models and other facilities that are needed for test and evaluation, validation and verification. This project will lay the foundation for a modeling and simulation infrastructure that will reduce barriers to research and development of autonomous systems and will enable collaboration in this important research area. This will accelerate the implementation of these systems that will have numerous benefits to society.This project will plan a community research infrastructure. The planning process will include a broad-based community of researchers from multiple institutions, including experts in robotics systems, modeling and simulation, test & evaluation, and software engineering, and will engage them in multiple ways. The planning group will develop use cases, design the infrastructure architecture, and identify key partners. A broader group will provide input via a survey and a workshop at a robotics conference. The ultimate deliverable of this planning project will be a proposal to be submitted in January 2022. The infrastructure will include hardware, software, APIs, user interfaces, libraries of models, a development and testing environment, and documentation.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.