A Soft Drone with Multi-modal Mobility for the Exploration of Confined Spaces

Fabris, Amedeo; Kirchgeorg, Steffen; Mintchev, Stefano

doi:10.1109/ssrr53300.2021.9597683

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Some platforms also tolerate contact with obstacles in the sense that the contact does not endanger the continuation of the mission (Huang et al, 2019). Other types of platforms adapt their morphology and/or locomotion modality to their current surroundings and obstacles (Fabris et al, 2021). In voxel-based map representations, the size of a narrow passage is represented too conservatively, i.e., the size of the narrow passage in the voxel map is the lower bound of the true size.…”

Section: Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

UAVs Beneath the Surface: Cooperative Autonomy for Subterranean Search and Rescue in DARPA SubT

Petrlík¹,

Petráček²,

Krátký³

et al. 2023

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This paper presents a novel approach for autonomous cooperating UAVs in search and rescue operations in subterranean domains with complex topology. The proposed system was ranked second in the Virtual Track of the DARPA SubT Finals as part of the team CTU-CRAS-NORLAB. In contrast to the winning solution that was developed specifically for the Virtual Track, the proposed solution also proved to be a robust system for deployment onboard physical UAVs flying in the extremely harsh and confined environment of the real-world competition. The proposed approach enables fully autonomous and decentralized deployment of a UAV team with seamless simulation-toworld transfer, and proves its advantage over less mobile UGV teams in the flyable space of diverse environments. The main contributions of the paper are present in the mapping and navigation pipelines. The mapping approach employs novel map representations—SphereMap for efficient risk-aware long-distance planning, FacetMap for surface coverage, and the compressed topologicalvolumetric LTVMap for allowing multirobot cooperation under low-bandwidth communication. These representations are used in navigation together with novel methods for visibility-constrained informed search in a general 3D environment with no assumptions about the environment structure, while balancing deep exploration with sensor-coverage exploitation. The proposed solution also includes a visual-perception pipeline for on-board detection and localization of objects of interest in four RGB stream at 5 Hz each without a dedicated GPU. Apart from participation in the DARPA SubT, the performance of the UAV system is supported by extensive experimental verification in diverse environments with both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

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Section: Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%