CAREER: Resilient Low-Cost Robot Teams for Autonomous Aquatic Exploration

该学院早期职业发展（CAREER）项目的主要目标是研究和开发用于水生环境探索的低成本多机器人系统，实现水生自主机器人的民主化。水覆盖了地球的70%，经济的很大一部分，被称为“蓝色经济”，价值至少24万亿美元，依赖于一个健康的水生世界，需要对其进行研究和监测。机器人可以自动完成这些任务。然而，到目前为止，实际部署的水上机器人价格昂贵（约为10万至100万美元）。目前的多机器人探索算法在水下并不稳健，因为没有明确考虑由水生领域和廉价机器人配置造成的固有限制-例如缺乏全局定位和通信基础设施（例如，GPS和蜂窝网络）和有限的通信带宽（比特每秒）。该项目将为廉价的自主水面和水下航行器团队提供弹性合作探索算法，这些算法明确考虑了这些限制。该项目的成果将推动低成本移动的机器人在极端环境中的自主性。更广泛地说，该项目将有助于降低水生机器人的进入门槛，并促进更广泛的教育推广和支持健康水生世界的任务。该项目将研究活动与教育和推广计划相结合;例如，针对环境监测任务进行真实的部署，为K-12学生组织夏令营，并让本科生/研究生参与研究。该项目将在智能上为三个基本机器人研究主题的新算法开发做出贡献，并在真实的水环境中与真实的低成本机器人进行全面的系统集成：（1）通过定位和通信约束的概率建模，优化多个冲突目标，并在概率表示中进行推理以找到安全的最佳路径，进行弹性合作多机器人3D探索;（2）通过紧密耦合状态估计和规划来计算信息价值，并设计优化框架以最小化低带宽通信信道的使用，但确保态势感知，从而实现弹性通信;（3）通过设计计算非线性的算法，近视会合轨迹的基础上明确建模的定位和通信，并允许自适应联盟的形成，以避免损失的单个机器人和整个系统;（4）将算法与一组廉价的定制ASV和AUV集成，这些ASV和AUV将在模拟，真实的游泳池和湖泊/海洋环境中进行严格测试。该研究的预期成果是低成本水上机器人的新算法，这将增强其探索能力，并允许更简单的部署。该项目得到了机器人项目跨董事会基础研究的支持，由工程局（ENG）和计算机与信息科学与工程局（CISE）共同管理和资助该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project’s main objective is to study and develop low-cost multirobot systems for aquatic environments exploration, towards democratizing aquatic autonomous robotics. With water covering 70 percent of the Earth, a large part of the economy, called “Blue Economy” and valued to be at least US$24 trillion, relies on a healthy aquatic world, requiring its study and monitoring. Robots could automate these tasks. However, to date, aquatic robots deployed in practice are expensive (in the order of US$100k-US$1M). Current multi-robot exploration algorithms are not robust underwater, as the intrinsic limitations posed by the aquatic domain and inexpensive robot configuration are not explicitly considered – such as absence of global localization and communication infrastructure (e.g., GPS and cellular network) and limited communication bandwidth (bits per seconds). This project will produce resilient cooperative exploration algorithms for teams of inexpensive Autonomous Surface and Underwater Vehicles, that explicitly consider those limitations. This project outcomes will advance the state of the art on low-cost mobile robot autonomy in extreme environments. More broadly, the project will contribute to lower the barrier to entry in aquatic robotics and catalyze a broader educational outreach and support tasks for a healthy aquatic world. This project integrates research activities with educational and outreach plans; example include targeting environmental monitoring tasks with real deployments, organizing a summer camp for K-12 students, and involving undergraduate/graduate students in research. The project will intellectually contribute on novel algorithmic developments to three fundamental robotics research themes and on a comprehensive system integration with real low-cost robots in real aquatic environments: (1) resilient cooperative multirobot 3D exploration by probabilistic modeling of localization and communication constraints, optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, and reasoning in a probabilistic representation to find a safe optimal path; (2) resilient communication by tightly coupling state estimation and planning to calculate information value and designing an optimization framework to minimize the use of the low-bandwidth communication channel, but ensure situational awareness; (3) graceful recovery by designing algorithms that calculate a non-myopic rendezvous trajectory based on explicit modeling of localization and communication and allow for adaptive coalition formation to avoid loss of the single robot and of the whole system; (4) integration of the algorithms with a team of inexpensive custom-made ASVs and AUVs, which will be rigorously tested in simulations, real pool and lake/ocean environments. The research expected outcomes are new algorithms for low-cost aquatic robots that will augment their exploration capabilities and allow simpler deployments.This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).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.