3 research outputs found
Carnegie Mellon Team Tartan: Mission-level Robustness with Rapidly Deployed Autonomous Aerial Vehicles in the MBZIRC 2020
For robotics systems to be used in high risk, real-world situations, they
have to be quickly deployable and robust to environmental changes,
under-performing hardware, and mission subtask failures. Robots are often
designed to consider a single sequence of mission events, with complex
algorithms lowering individual subtask failure rates under some critical
constraints. Our approach is to leverage common techniques in vision and
control and encode robustness into mission structure through outcome monitoring
and recovery strategies, aided by a system infrastructure that allows for quick
mission deployments under tight time constraints and no central communication.
We also detail lessons in rapid field robotics development and testing. Systems
were developed and evaluated through real-robot experiments at an outdoor test
site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, as well as in the 2020 Mohamed Bin Zayed
International Robotics Challenge. All competition trials were completed in
fully autonomous mode without RTK-GPS. Our system led to 4th place in Challenge
2 and 7th place in the Grand Challenge, and achievements like popping five
balloons (Challenge 1), successfully picking and placing a block (Challenge 2),
and dispensing the most water autonomously with a UAV of all teams onto an
outdoor, real fire (Challenge 3).Comment: 28 pages, 26 figures. To appear in Field Robotics, Special Issues on
MBZIRC 202