Collaborative Research: NRI: Dispersed Autonomy for Marsupial Aerial Robot Teams

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This project will conduct innovative integration of robotics technologies to create Marsupial Aerial Robot Teams (MARTs) whereby small uninhabited aircraft systems (i.e. drones) carry smaller aircraft to provide observations of the atmosphere. Effective advanced warning systems enabled by the data collected by MARTs could drastically reduce the loss of life and damage caused by severe weather. Aerial robotic systems operating in places too dangerous for humans or expensive single-vehicle systems will need to reason over detailed models and large amounts of data. This project will create and deploy a team of robots that will be like an autonomous airborne meteorologist performing online targeted forecasting. MARTs achieve the National Robotics Initiative’s goal to promote the integration of robots to the benefit of humans. This project will develop an autonomous airborne meteorologist that consists of teams of aerial robots connected to dispersed users and computing resources. The effort embodies the theme of innovative integration of robotic technologies by advancing current practices through new fundamental algorithms integrated, deployed, and evaluated on marsupial aerial robot teams. Integrated robotic technologies include: i.) air-launched pseudo-Lagrangian drifters; ii.) ensemble sensitivity analysis for autonomous targeted observation; iii.) algorithms that solve online continuous-domain partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs); iv.) parallelized path planning in uncertain flows; and v.) a dispersed autonomy architecture for marsupial aerial robot teams.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.