Ground robotics in tunnels: Keys and lessons learned after 10 years of research and experiments

Tardioli, Danilo; Riazuelo, Luis; Sicignano, Domenico; Rizzo, Carlos; Lera, F.; Villarroel, José Luis; Montano, Luis

doi:10.1002/rob.21871

Cited by 30 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(79 reference statements)

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“…From a systems perspective, the set of works in (Morris et al, 2006;Novák et al, 2015;Maity et al, 2013) overview innovations in the domain of ground and submersible subterranean robotics. An overview of the utilization of ground robotic systems in underground environments is provided in (Tardioli et al, 2019). Furthermore, the methods in (Bakambu and Polotski, 2007;Lösch et al, 2018) outline navigation solutions for robotic rovers underground.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CERBERUS: Autonomous Legged and Aerial Robotic Exploration in the Tunnel and Urban Circuits of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Tranzatto¹,

Mascarich²,

Bernreiter³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Autonomous exploration of subterranean environments constitutes a major frontier for robotic systems as underground settings present key challenges that can render robot autonomy hard to achieve. This has motivated the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, where teams of robots search for objects of interest in various underground environments. In response, the CERBERUS system-of-systems is presented as a unified strategy towards subterranean exploration using legged and flying robots. As primary robots, ANYmal quadruped systems are deployed considering their endurance and potential to traverse challenging terrain. For aerial robots, both conventional and collision-tolerant multirotors are utilized to explore spaces too narrow or otherwise unreachable by ground systems. Anticipating degraded sensing conditions, a complementary multi-modal sensor fusion approach utilizing camera, LiDAR, and inertial data for resilient robot pose estimation is proposed. Individual robot pose estimates are refined by a centralized multi-robot map optimization approach to improve the reported location accuracy of detected objects of interest in the DARPA-defined

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CERBERUS: Autonomous Legged and Aerial Robotic Exploration in the Tunnel and Urban Circuits of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Tranzatto¹,

Mascarich²,

Bernreiter³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…The work in Jacobson et al (2020) emphasizes the localization challenges in subterranean settings. From a system's perspective, the works in Morris et al (2006) amd Novák et al (2015) overview innovations in ground and submersible subterranean robotics, while the paper in Tardioli et al (2019) provides an overview on the use of ground robots underground. Furthermore, the methods in Bakambu and Polotski (2007) and Lösch et al (2018) outline navigation solutions for robotic rovers underground.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Graph‐based subterranean exploration path planning using aerial and legged robots

Dang

Tranzatto

Khattak

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

132

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Autonomous exploration of subterranean environments remains a major challenge for robotic systems. In response, this paper contributes a novel graph-based subterranean exploration path planning method that is attuned to key topological properties of subterranean settings, such as large-scale tunnel-like networks and complex multibranched topologies. Designed both for aerial and legged robots, the proposed method is structured around a bifurcated local-and global-planner architecture. The local planner utilizes a rapidly exploring random graph to reliably and efficiently identify paths that optimize an exploration gain within a local subspace, while simultaneously avoiding obstacles, respecting applicable traversability constraints and honoring dynamic limitations of the robots. Reflecting the fact that multibranched and tunnel-like networks of underground environments can often lead to dead-ends and accounting for the robot endurance, the global planning layer works in conjunction with the local planner to incrementally build a sparse global graph and is engaged when the system must be repositioned to a previously identified frontier of the exploration space, or commanded to return-to-home. The designed planner is detailed with respect to its computational complexity and compared against state-of-the-art approaches. Emphasizing field experimentation, the method is evaluated within multiple real-life deployments using aerial robots and the ANYmal legged system inside both long-wall and room-and-pillar underground mines in the United States and in Switzerland, as well as inside an underground bunker. The presented results further include missions conducted within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge, a relevant competition on underground exploration.

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“…However, it is still challenging to maintain a reliable system under harsh realworld constraints. Efforts have been made to tackle similar real-world challenges in the context of robot tele-operation on disaster response [1] and robot team exploration of tunnel-like environments [12], [13]. Despite the growth and increasing attention in this field, there are still open questions and engineering challenges to build a reliable mobile network without external communication infrastructure, especially in large-scale environments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

Ginting

Otsu

Edlund

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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A well-structured and reliable networking is key to the successful operations of autonomous multi-robot systems. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a multi-robot networking architecture CHORD (Collaborative High-bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables) based on two popular robotics middleware, ROS 1 and ROS 2. We discuss the benefit and best practices of combining two different frameworks that share the same spirit and show its performance from large-scale real-world experiments. The proposed system is developed as part of Team CoSTAR's effort for the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. 2 The system has been fieldproved and demonstrated in the Urban Circuit event, where team CoSTAR won first place. To our knowledge, this work is the first real-world demonstration of a ROS 2-based multi-robot system in such large-scale extreme environments. From the significant improvement of the communication performance and the ease of transition from existing ROS 1 systems, this work encourages wider adoption of ROS 2 in field robotics applications.

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Ground robotics in tunnels: Keys and lessons learned after 10 years of research and experiments

Cited by 30 publications

References 61 publications

CERBERUS: Autonomous Legged and Aerial Robotic Exploration in the Tunnel and Urban Circuits of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

CERBERUS: Autonomous Legged and Aerial Robotic Exploration in the Tunnel and Urban Circuits of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Graph‐based subterranean exploration path planning using aerial and legged robots

CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments

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