An experiment on squad navigation of human and robots IARP/EURON Workshop on Robotics for Risky Interventions and Environmental Surveillance January 7th-8th, Benicàssim (Spain) L. Nomdedeu, J. Sales, E. Cervera, J. Alemany, R. Sebastia, J. Penders, V. Gazi

Overview Introduction System configuration Implementation The experiment Conclusion and future work

Introduction: motivation Experiment: a set of robots (acting as a swarm) and one person. The aim of robot-human squad: to explore an indoors area. Fire-fighters: –no sensing capabilities –no map of the building

Introduction : statement of the problem Our system must be able to integrate: –Exploration and obstacle avoidance –Following the human and localizing itself Pose problem: –Tracking the human with the escorts lasers –Providing him with an accelerometer- gyroscope-magnetometer (IMU)

Introduction: related work Laser range finders: –To find and track humans –Detecting multiple moving objects, multiple humans Video data: –lack of visibility Localization, obstacle avoidance, path-planning –Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization Plus –Vector Field Histogram (VFH) –Nearness Diagram (ND)

System configuration: HW setup Robots: mobile commercial platform Erratic from Videre-design –lasers readings, –encoder data, –sonar data, –imu data

System configuration: HW setup Fire-fighter: laptop along with an imu sensor

System configuration: SW setup Laptop will provide the fire-fighter –an estimation of his own pose –a new orientation and velocity to take Three roles in our human-robot system

System configuration: SW setup Logical scheme of the system

Implementation: SW architecture Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) provided by the Player platform.

Implementation: tracking Human being localization through only the laser rangefinder data ( ,r): polar coordinates of the fire-fighter centroid  : threshold of distance  : angle of the reading

Implementation: tracking

Estimated global position and velocity of the fire-fighter: –Relative fire-fighter position and velocity –Robot’s own estimated position and velocity. Formation rules:

The experiment Partially tested in simulation Robots guiding the human through our department Human: only laptop information Collision free path Occlusions along the path

Conclusion and future work We have validated the use of mobile platforms in hazardous environments as a support for human beings More robustness can be implemented: –Supporting more unstructured environments –Improving system reliability –Improving pose fusion and prediction –Online SLAM approach –Full Human Augmented Mapping (HAM) system