论文标题
表面下的无人机:DARPA Subt的地下搜救和救援的合作自治
UAVs Beneath the Surface: Cooperative Autonomy for Subterranean Search and Rescue in DARPA SubT
论文作者
论文摘要
本文提出了一种新颖的方法,用于在具有复杂拓扑的地下领域中在搜索和救援行动中进行无人机合作。作为CTU-Cras-Norlab团队的一部分,拟议的系统在DARPA SubT决赛的虚拟轨道中排名第二。与专门为虚拟轨道开发的获胜解决方案相反,拟议的解决方案也被证明是在现实世界竞争极其严酷且狭窄的环境中飞行的船上物理无人机的强大系统。提出的方法可以使无缝模拟到世界转移的无人机团队完全自主和分散的部署,并证明了其在不同环境的可飞行空间中较少移动的UGV团队的优势。该论文的主要贡献存在于映射和导航管道中。映射方法采用新颖的地图表示形式 - 用于有效的风险感知长距离计划,面对面覆盖范围以及压缩的拓扑 - 量化LTVMAP的球形,以允许在低频道通信下进行多机器人合作。这些表示形式与新的方法一起在导航中使用,以在一般的3D环境中可见性受到可见性的知情搜索,而对环境结构没有任何假设,同时将深度探索与传感器覆盖的剥削保持平衡。所提出的解决方案还包括一条视觉感知管道,用于在没有专用GPU的情况下在5 Hz处进行四个RGB流中感兴趣的对象的板上检测和定位。除了参与DARPA SubT外,在定性和定量评估的不同环境中,广泛的实验验证提供了无人机系统的性能。
This paper presents a novel approach for autonomous cooperating UAVs in search and rescue operations in subterranean domains with complex topology. The proposed system was ranked second in the Virtual Track of the DARPA SubT Finals as part of the team CTU-CRAS-NORLAB. In contrast to the winning solution that was developed specifically for the Virtual Track, the proposed solution also proved to be a robust system for deployment onboard physical UAVs flying in the extremely harsh and confined environment of the real-world competition. The proposed approach enables fully autonomous and decentralized deployment of a UAV team with seamless simulation-to-world transfer, and proves its advantage over less mobile UGV teams in the flyable space of diverse environments. The main contributions of the paper are present in the mapping and navigation pipelines. The mapping approach employs novel map representations -- SphereMap for efficient risk-aware long-distance planning, FacetMap for surface coverage, and the compressed topological-volumetric LTVMap for allowing multi-robot cooperation under low-bandwidth communication. These representations are used in navigation together with novel methods for visibility-constrained informed search in a general 3D environment with no assumptions about the environment structure, while balancing deep exploration with sensor-coverage exploitation. The proposed solution also includes a visual-perception pipeline for on-board detection and localization of objects of interest in four RGB stream at 5 Hz each without a dedicated GPU. Apart from participation in the DARPA SubT, the performance of the UAV system is supported by extensive experimental verification in diverse environments with both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.