FVD

System Features

  • Collaborative mapping and localisation through information sharing
  • Parallelising search using efficient Task Allocation
  • Cooperative navigation and swarm intelligence
  • Detect and report humans

MRSLAM

  • Lidar “blowout” bug: solved by detecting blowout when laser readings are all bigger than a certain value, mitigated by restarting LRF module
  • Spinning odometry bug: solved by making yaw range (-pi, pi] instead of [-pi, pi]

Perception

  • Search behavior refinement
  • Increase rotations for robustness
  • Manual camera focusing pipeline

Task Generation

  • Bug fixes for coverage task generation:
    • Sometimes redundant tasks still generated
    • Tasks sometimes not generated in small rooms, decreased minimum task size
  • Visualization improvements
    • Task heatmap

Task Allocation

  • Greedy/ Naive allocator does not explore the map fast enough (stays too close to the home for too long) -> wastes precious time
  • Lack of big picture view leads to inefficient task allocation!
  • Greedy/ Naive allocator wastes too much time in low information areas

Can we model information gain in the environment and exploit that to achieve better performance?

  • Coverage Tasks which have been crossed before have low information
  • Bigger frontiers have more information than smaller frontiers
  • As search progresses information flows from frontiers to coverage tasks

NEW MORE OPTIMAL TASK ALLOCATOR !

HIGH (Hierarchical Information Gain Heuristic) Allocation

  • Information-theoretic approach: task weight is encoded by its information gain
  • Balances exploration vs exploitation with weights based on explored area 
  • HIGH on average obtains a 16% better life score (sum of times) than Naive

Navigation

  • Continued IRL testing + finetuning

Fleet Management System

  • LEDs to indicate detected victim
  • Bugfix: template not killed cleanly
  • Bugfix: Agent bringup bad data

Simulation

  • Setup Stage Sim with Pseudo-Apriltags to run experiments