CRW
23 May 2016The Cooperative Robotic Watercraft (CRW) project focuses on the challenge of developing control techniques for operator control of large robot teams in the wild. Small, autonomous watercraft are an ideal approach to a number of applications in flood mitigation and response, environmental sampling, and numerous other applications. Relative to other types of vehicles, watercraft are inexpensive, simple, robust and reliable.
Using an Android phone for navigation, communication, and camera imagery, and off-the-shelf RC boat components, we were able to build a low cost fleet of both fan-propelled airboats for shallow water bodies and dual propeller differential-drive boats for high currents.
In order to capture team plans and plan context-specific operator interaction a new language was developed based on Petri Nets. These Situational Awareness and Mixed Initiative (SAMI) Petri Nets, or SPNs, are the subject of the PhD dissertation.
Here you can see a large team of boats and operator GUI driven entirely via a SPN. This plan is used to incrementally deploy boats while checking for hardware failures at our test site at Katara Beach in Doha, Qatar.
The CRW project was developed at Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University Qatar. Source code, including a simulation environment, is available here. JAR packaged executables are available for Windows, OSX, and Linux here.
Publications:
- Alessandro Farinelli, Masoume M. Raeissi, Nicolo’ Marchi, Nathan Brooks, and Paul Scerri. Interacting with team oriented plans in multi-robot systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 31(2):332–361, Mar 2017.
- A. Farinelli, N. Marchi, M. Raeissi, N. Brooks, and P. Scerri. A Mechanism for Smoothly Handling Human Interrupts in Team Oriented Plans. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2015.
- N. Brooks, E. de Visser, T. Chabuk, E. Freedy, and P. Scerri. An approach to team programming with markups for operator interaction. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2013.