EAPSI: Designing an all-terrain robotic drone data coordinator

Brand Howard, Christiansburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

Natural disasters often lead to catastrophic conditions making human response efforts risky and potentially hazardous. Consequently, there is an increased need to develop robotic systems capable of collaboratively navigating and collecting information in unstable environments. Current collaborative robotic systems capable of navigating these environments are limited in their ability to process and combine their individually collected data. Post processing at an off-site location is usually necessary and may not be achieved in time enough to initiate a strategic response. This research will lead to the development of an onsite robotic system capable of processing information from other robotic systems in real-time. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Makoto Kumon who has expertise in micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) and is developing a collaborative MAV acoustic localization system at Kumamoto University. Dr. Kumon's system provides an application and a platform for developing a robotic system capable of real-time complex data processing. This research will provide an important contribution toward the response of autonomous robotic systems in dynamic and complex environments. The system will be an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) which is capable of traversing through indoor environments as well as outdoor environments. The UGV will act as a compact mobile base station capable of receiving and processing data from a team of MAVs. The MAVs will collect acoustic data of a sound source at an unknown location. The goal of the research is for the UGV to be capable of processing the acoustic data to obtain a belief of the source location in real-time. The objective is for the UGV to recursively update the belief of the sound source location as it searches for it and continually receives data from the MAVs. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.