WARA-PS: a research arena for public safety demonstrations and autonomous collaborative rescue robotics experimentation

Abstract

A research arena (WARA-PS) for sensing, data fusion, user interaction, planning and control of collaborative autonomous aerial and surface vehicles in public safety applications is presented. The objective is to demonstrate scientific discoveries and to generate new directions for future research on autonomous systems for societal challenges. The enabler is a computational infrastructure with a core system architecture for industrial and academic collaboration. This includes a control and command system together with a framework for planning and executing tasks for unmanned surface vehicles and aerial vehicles. The motivating application for the demonstration is marine search and rescue operations. A state-of-art delegation framework for the mission planning together with three specific applications is also presented. The first one concerns model predictive control for cooperative rendezvous of autonomous unmanned aerial and surface vehicles. The second project is about learning to make safe real-time decisions under uncertainty for autonomous vehicles, and the third one is on robust terrain-aided navigation through sensor fusion and virtual reality tele-operation to support a GPS-free positioning system in marine environments. The research results have been experimentally evaluated and demonstrated to industry and public sector audiences at a marine test facility. It would be most difficult to do experiments on this large scale without the WARA-PS research arena. Furthermore, these demonstrator activities have resulted in effective research dissemination with high public visibility, business impact and new research collaborations between academia and industry.

Robust Trajectory Tracking for Underactuated Quadrotors with Prescribed Performance

“…The overall scheme is tested in real-world open-water experiments. We used Piraya, an autonomous USV developed by SAAB Kockums, as a research platform equipped with cameras, GPS, LIDAR, etc., in the WARA-PS research arena [30]. In this experiment, the GPS is used for determining the absolute position, while the obstacles are defined beforehand and remain static during the experiment.…”

“…We assume that the landing platform is large enough to accommodate M agents that can land simultaneously at prespecified positions c i ∈ B r−r saf e relative to the center of the landing platform. Moreover, due to the application testbed in hand [20], we will constrain the scheme to M agents, and additional follower agents can be included if a prioritization procedure is included in the proposed algorithm. We state the following assumption on the initial conditions and feasibility that will be used to analyze the algorithm convergence.…”