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Mine Tunnel Exploration Using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots

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Mine Tunnel Exploration Using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots 1 Mine Tunnel Exploration using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots Ian D. Miller1, Fernando Cladera1, Anthony Cowley1, Shreyas S. Shivakumar1, Elijah S. Lee1, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz1, Akhilesh Bhat1, Neil Rodrigues1, Alex Zhou1, Avraham Cohen1, Adarsh Kulkarni1, James Laney2, Camillo Jose Taylor1, and Vijay Kumar1 Abstract—Robotic exploration of underground environments is a particularly challenging problem due to communication, endurance, and traversability constraints which necessitate high degrees of autonomy and agility. These challenges are further exacerbated by the need to minimize human intervention for practical applications. While legged robots have the ability to traverse extremely challenging terrain, they also engender new challenges for planning, estimation, and control. In this work, we describe a fully autonomous system for multi- robot mine exploration and mapping using legged quadrupeds, as well as a distributed database mesh networking system for reporting data. In addition, we show results from the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) Tunnel Circuit demonstrating localization of artifacts after traversals of hundreds of meters. These experiments describe fully autonomous exploration of an unknown Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied Fig. 1: Quadrupedal platforms used at Tunnel Circuit with environment undertaken by legged robots. expanded view of sensor suite. Index Terms—Mining Robotics, Field Robots, Legged Robots Challenge (SubT). The goal of SubT is to detect, localize, and report as many artifacts as possible in an hour over a course of multiple kilometers of tunnel. Artifact categories are known a I. INTRODUCTION priori and include objects such as backpacks, manikins, and long-awaited promise of mobile robotics, almost from cellphones. Systems are not required to be autonomous, but all A its inception, has been the autonomous exploration of direct robot communication must be handled by one person, environments inhospitable to humans. Since at least the early and the environment naturally imposes severe communication 2000s, work has been ongoing to autonomously explore the constraints [3]. particularly dangerous and complex environment of subter- Limited bandwidth and connectivity require robotic systems ranean mines [1] [2]. In this work, we consider an “au- to operate successfully without any real-time feedback from tonomous mission” to be a mission where there is no human the human operator. All subsystems must run entirely on-board interaction after mission start. Mines present a wide variety on relatively compute-limited platforms. Furthermore, signifi- of challenges to virtually all aspects of robotics, including cant attention must be given to data compression, transmission, challenging and complex terrain, inherent GNSS and commu- and storage in order to provide the human operator with the nication denial, and sensory degradation. In addition, if robots arXiv:1909.09662v2 [cs.RO] 3 Feb 2020 most useful information over a limited-bandwidth link. are to be used practically in the field, procedures for robot In addition, underground environments contain a wide va- deployment and operator control must be highly automated, riety of terrains (e.g. concrete, deep mud, pitted railroad robust, and reliable. ties, and vertical shafts) over kilometers of tunnel. Since In an effort to accelerate development of technologies to ad- no single platform, or type of platform, is perfectly suited dresss these challenges, DARPA are running the Subterranean to all of these environments, we propose a loosely-coupled Manuscript received: September 10, 2019; Revised December 24, 2019; heterogeneous multi-robot system consisting of Micro-Aerial Accepted January 3, 2020. Vehicles (MAVs) and legged quadrupeds. Recent work has This paper was recommended for publication by Editor Jonathan Roberts noted the capabilities for MAVs in underground environments upon evaluation of the Associate Editor and Reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the MAST Collaborative Technology Alliance - to traverse areas rapidly that ground-based systems cannot Contract No. W911NF-08-2-0004, ARL grant W911NF-08-2-0004, ONR reach [4] [5] [6]. However, there are limits on the flight time, grants N00014-07-1-0829, N00014-14-1-0510, ARO grant W911NF-13-1- mission length, and payload that such platforms can support. 0350, NSF grants IIS-1426840, IIS-1138847, DARPA grants HR001151626, HR0011516850, and in part by the Semiconductor Research Corporation We therefore additionally employ Ghost Robotics (GR) Vision (SRC), DARPA, and a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. 60 quadrupeds (Fig. 1) to enable long duration missions 1 The authors are with the GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, with a larger sensor payload. Quadrupeds have the potential Philadelphia PA 19104. [email protected] 2James Laney is with Ghost Robotics, Philadelphia PA 19146. capability to traverse highly complex and unstructured terrain Digital Object Identifier (DOI): see top of this page. such as steps more easily than treaded or wheeled robots, 2 making them suited for underground environments [7], but they have been minimally utilized in real-world autonomous applications. In a work similar to ours, Bellicoso et al. [8] navigate outdoor environments with a quadruped, but they (a) assume GNSS availability and (b) assume a pre-existing global map or manual path definition. In this work, we discuss the system design for the legged robots, but note that the detection and communication portions of our approach are platform-agnostic and are utilized across a heterogeneous suite of robots including quadrotors. The primary contributions of our work are as follows: • We present the architecture and detail the components of Fig. 2: Hardware architecture of individual robot showing our exploration and planning algorithms for autonomous sensors and compute as well as interconnect to other robots, exploration of underground tunnel environments. the basestation, and the DARPA infrastructure. • We discuss communication, detection, and mapping sys- tems that enable rapid situational awareness for a single operator in communication-challenged environments. • We show results from testing in a motion capture space in the lab, as well as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) mine at the SubT Tunnel Circuit, including multiple autonomous traversals of hun- dreds of meters in different mines. These experiments describe long-duration entirely autonomous exploration undertaken by legged robots. Fig. 3: High level software architecture. Aside from the II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW basestation, all ROS nodes run locally on the robot. The A. Hardware Architecture launch manager handles starting and stopping its’ member We chose the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier as the primary nodes based on commands sent through the basestation. computer for the legged platform. The Xavier contains 8 ARM Communication between robots occurs exclusively via the CPU cores as well as 512 GPU CUDA cores with 16GB of distributed database system (Sec. VII), and communication shared RAM. We can therefore distribute the software load with the basestation via a combination of the distributed between the CPU and GPU, which is particularly valuable for database and a separate mechanism for sending commands tasks such as mapping and image processing. and obtaining telemetry. Subsystems, packaged as ROS nodes, The hardware architecture is shown in Fig. 2. Our primary are launched, stopped, and monitored by a launch manager exteroceptive sensor is an Ouster OS-1 64-beam LiDAR, daemon. In this fashion, the operator can individually stop which is used for navigation, planning, and mapping. Two pmd and start the robot’s subsystems, as well as verify that each is picoflexx time-of-flight sensors are used for short-range depth operating as expected without needing an SSH or direct ROS sensing in front of the robot to aid in local planning. We em- connection to the robot. This interface is pictured in Fig. 9. ploy an Intel RealSense T265 stereo tracking camera for local This approach proved to be extremely useful for rapid startup, high-speed visual-inertial pose estimation. A StereoLabs Zed shutdown, and debug of systems in the field. Mini stereo camera, FLIR Boson IR camera, and Bluetooth radio are the primary sensors used for object detection, with A block diagram of the software architecture is shown in the thermal camera primarily useful for detecting survivors Fig. 3. Each subsystem is largely independent, enabling a high (humans) due to body heat and the bluetooth detector for degree of robustness. We made an early decision to separate detecting cell phones. An XBee is required for emergency the lower level autonomy systems, such as the local planner stop override capability by DARPA. and controller, from higher level systems such as the mapper For communication, we use a Rajant dual-band mesh net- and state machine. Therefore, even if the global mapper fails working system. The Xavier additionally communicates with or diverges, the robot remains capable of locally determining the Vision 60 gait controller via UDP over Ethernet to send feasible directions to travel. This robustness was found to be high-level navigation commands in the form of body-frame very useful in experiments. twists. III. MAPPING B. Software Architecture The mapper is based on an atlas framework [9] with a Our full software stack is built on the Robot Operating pose graph [10] skeleton linking together local maps, or System
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