Cooperative Modular Manipulation with Numerous Cable-Driven Robots for Assistive Construction and Gap Crossing

Soldiers in the field often need to cross negative obstacles, such as rivers or canyons, to reach goals or safety. Military gap crossing involves on-site temporary bridges construction. However, this procedure is conducted with dangerous, time and labor intensive operations, and specialized machinery. We envision a scalable robotic solution inspired by advancements in force-controlled and Cable Driven Parallel Robots (CDPRs); this solution can address the challenges inherent in this transportation problem, achieving fast, efficient, and safe deployment and field operations. We introduce the embodied vision in Co3MaNDR, a solution to the military gap crossing problem, a distributed robot consisting of several modules simultaneously pulling on a central payload, controlling the cables' tensions to achieve complex objectives, such as precise trajectory tracking or force amplification. Hardware experiments demonstrate teleoperation of a payload, trajectory following, and the sensing and amplification of operators' applied physical forces during slow operations. An operator was shown to manipulate a 27.2 kg (60 lb) payload with an average force utilization of 14.5\% of its weight. Results indicate that the system can be scaled up to heavier payloads without compromising performance or introducing superfluous complexity. This research lays a foundation to expand CDPR technology to uncoordinated and unstable mobile platforms in unknown environments.

In Situ Soil Property Estimation for Autonomous Earthmoving Using Physics-Infused Neural Networks

A novel, learning-based method for in situ estimation of soil properties using a physics-infused neural network (PINN) is presented. The network is trained to produce estimates of soil cohesion, angle of internal friction, soil-tool friction, soil failure angle, and residual depth of cut which are then passed through an earthmoving model based on the fundamental equation of earthmoving (FEE) to produce an estimated force. The network ingests a short history of kinematic observations along with past control commands and predicts interaction forces accurately with average error of less than 2kN, 13% of the measured force. To validate the approach, an earthmoving simulation of a bladed vehicle is developed using Vortex Studio, enabling comparison of the estimated parameters to pseudo-ground-truth values which is challenging in real-world experiments. The proposed approach is shown to enable accurate estimation of interaction forces and produces meaningful parameter estimates even when the model and the environmental physics deviate substantially.

A Robust Localization Solution for an Uncrewed Ground Vehicle in Unstructured Outdoor GNSS-Denied Environments

This work addresses the challenge of developing a localization system for an uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) operating autonomously in unstructured outdoor Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. The goal is to enable accurate mapping and long-range navigation with practical applications in domains such as autonomous construction, military engineering missions, and exploration of non-Earth planets. The proposed system - Terrain-Referenced Assured Engineer Localization System (TRAELS) - integrates pose estimates produced by two complementary terrain referenced navigation (TRN) methods with wheel odometry and inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurements using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Unlike simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems that require loop closures, the described approach maintains accuracy over long distances and one-way missions without the need to revisit previous positions. Evaluation of TRAELS is performed across a range of environments. In regions where a combination of distinctive geometric and ground surface features are present, the developed TRN methods are leveraged by TRAELS to consistently achieve an absolute trajectory error of less than 3.0 m. The approach is also shown to be capable of recovering from large accumulated drift when traversing feature-sparse areas, which is essential in ensuring robust performance of the system across a wide variety of challenging GNSS-denied environments. Overall, the effectiveness of the system in providing precise localization and mapping capabilities in challenging GNSS-denied environments is demonstrated and an analysis is performed leading to insights for improving TRN approaches for UGVs.