MRCS

The Multi-robot Control System (MrCS) is used in conjunction with the Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation (USARSim), which can simulate high-fidelity urban search and rescue scenarios. This year, we added a new data management system to the operator interface, the image queue. The image queue allows the operator to asynchronously view imagery from the team using a priority queue. Priority score of individual images is a combination of factors such as the amount of previously unseen territory captured by the image and vision based probability of a victim being present in the image. This allows for rapid operator coverage of very large areas by selecting a small subset of the image database which captures the entirety of the world.

When victims are detected, a sub queue is created, displaying images from different angles near the indicated position. This allows for quick and accurate refinement of the victim location and condition via triangulation. If sufficient high quality imagery is unavailable, a task to return to the area and take more imagery can be added to the system, which is then allocated to a robot using the MrCS distributed task allocation.

MrCS was developed at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh.

Publications

• S. Chien, M. Lewis, S. Mehrotra, N. Brooks, and Katia Sycara. Scheduling operator attention for multi-robot control. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, pages 473–479. 2012.
• N. Brooks, P. Scerri, K. Sycara, H. Wang, S. Chien, and M. Lewis. Asynchronous control with ATR for large robot teams. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, volume 55, pages 444–448. 2011.
• S. Okamoto, N. Brooks, S. Owens, K. Sycara, and P. Scerri. Allocating spatially distributed tasks in large, dynamic robot teams. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1245–1246, 2011.
• H. Wang, A. Kolling, N. Brooks, M. Lewis, and K. Sycara. Synchronous vs. asynchronous control for large robot teams. Virtual and Mixed Reality-Systems and Applications, pages 415–424, 2011.
• H. Wang, A. Kolling, N. Brooks, S. Owens, S. Abedin, P. Scerri, P. Lee, S. Chien, M. Lewis, and K. Sycara. Scalable target detection for large robot teams. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction, pages 363–370. 2011.