Learning-Augmented Model-Based Multi-Robot Planning for Time-Critical Search and Inspection Under Uncertainty

In disaster response or surveillance operations, quickly identifying areas needing urgent attention is critical, but deploying response teams to every location is inefficient or often impossible. Effective performance in this domain requires coordinating a multi-robot inspection team to prioritize inspecting locations more likely to need immediate response, while also minimizing travel time. This is particularly challenging because robots must directly observe the locations to determine which ones require additional attention. This work introduces a multi-robot planning framework for coordinated time-critical multi-robot search under uncertainty. Our approach uses a graph neural network to estimate the likelihood of PoIs needing attention from noisy sensor data and then uses those predictions to guide a multi-robot model-based planner to determine the cost-effective plan. Simulated experiments demonstrate that our planner improves performance at least by 16.3\%, 26.7\%, and 26.2\% for 1, 3, and 5 robots, respectively, compared to non-learned and learned baselines. We also validate our approach on real-world platforms using quad-copters.

ReLoki: Infrastructure-free Distributed Relative Localization using On-board UWB Antenna Arrays

Coordination of multi-robot systems require some form of localization between agents, but most methods today rely on some external infrastructure. Ultra Wide Band (UWB) sensing has gained popularity in relative localization applications, and we see many implementations that use cooperative agents augmenting UWB range measurements with other sensing modalities (e.g., ViO, IMU, VSLAM) for infrastructure-free relative localization. A lesser researched option is using Angle of Arrival (AoA) readings obtained from UWB Antenna pairs to perform relative localization. In this paper we present a UWB platform called ReLoki that can be used for ranging and AoA-based relative localization in~3D. ReLoki enables any message sent from a transmitting agent to be localized by using a Regular Tetrahedral Antenna Array (RTA). As a full scale proof of concept, we deploy ReLoki on a 3-robot system and compare its performance in terms of accuracy and speed with prior methods.

Real-Time Distributed Infrastructure-free Searching and Target Tracking via Virtual Pheromones

Actively searching for targets using a multi-agent system in an unknown environment poses a two-pronged problem, where on the one hand we need agents to cover as much of the environment as possible with little overlap and on the other hand the agents must coordinate among themselves to select and track targets thereby maximizing detection performance. This paper proposes a fully distributed solution for an ad hoc network of agents to cooperatively search for targets and monitor them in an unknown infrastructure-free environment. The solution combines a distributed pheromone-based coverage control strategy with a distributed target selection mechanism. We further expand the scope to show the implementation of the proposed algorithm on a Lighter Than Air (LTA) multi-robotic system that can search and track objects in priori unknown locations.

Lighter-Than-Air Autonomous Ball Capture and Scoring Robot -- Design, Development, and Deployment

This paper describes the full end-to-end design of our primary scoring agent in an aerial autonomous robotics competition from April 2023. As open-ended robotics competitions become more popular, we wish to begin documenting successful team designs and approaches. The intended audience of this paper is not only any future or potential participant in this particular national Defend The Republic (DTR) competition, but rather anyone thinking about designing their first robot or system to be entered in a competition with clear goals. Future DTR participants can and should either build on the ideas here, or find new alternate strategies that can defeat the most successful design last time. For non-DTR participants but students interested in robotics competitions, identifying the minimum viable system needed to be competitive is still important in helping manage time and prioritizing tasks that are crucial to competition success first.