Team NimbRo's UGV Solution for Autonomous Wall Building and Fire Fighting at MBZIRC 2020

Abstract

Autonomous robotic systems for various applications including transport, mobile manipulation, and disaster response are becoming more and more complex. Evaluating and analyzing such systems is challenging. Robotic competitions are designed to benchmark complete robotic systems on complex state-of-the-art tasks. Participants compete in defined scenarios under equal conditions. We present our UGV solution developed for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge 2020. Our hard-and software components to address the challenge tasks of wall building and fire fighting are integrated into a fully autonomous system. The robot consists of a wheeled omnidirectional base, a 6 DoF manipulator arm equipped with a magnetic gripper, a highly efficient storage system to transport box-shaped objects, and a water spraying system to fight fires. The robot perceives its environment using 3D LiDAR as well as RGB and thermal camera-based perception modules, is capable of picking box-shaped objects and constructing a pre-defined wall structure, as well as detecting and localizing heat sources in order to extinguish potential fires. A high-level planner solves the challenge tasks using the robot skills. We analyze and discuss our successful participation during the MBZIRC 2020 finals, present further experiments, and provide insights to our lessons learned.

Towards Autonomous Firefighting UAVs: Online Planners for Obstacle Avoidance and Payload Delivery

“…8 Scheme of the firefighting mission planner's state machine and modules structure. Boolean conditions trigger the events that let each module activate, one at time facing with the flight controller through a specific package 4 , developed by the organizers of the competition. The payload delivery is achieved by sending a release command through ROS topic that deactivates the magnet that holds the ball, making it free-fall.…”