Titulo Estágio
Implementation of a Mobile Ad Hoc Network communication protocol for Human-Robot Search and Rescue Teams.
Área Tecnológica
Comunicação Telemática
Local do Estágio
DEI
Enquadramento
The CHOPIN Project
This internship is part of a three-year FCT funded project, called CHOPIN . The CHOPIN project aims at exploiting human-robot symbiosis in the development of human rescuers' support systems for small-scale search and rescue missions in urban catastrophic incidents, an application domain with an unquestionable beneficial impact on society. Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a sub-class of multi-agent systems (MAS), which have great potential regarding parallelism, efficiency and robustness in tasks which are either distributed in space or too complex to be accomplished by a single mobile robot. These benefits hinge on suitable internal team organization to achieve coordination and cooperation, which in turn require efficient information sharing. MRS may be very useful on assisting humans in many distributed activities, especially in hazardous scenarios, by extending human perception and actuation with distributed sensors and actuators. In the end of the project, a proof of concept will be developed for innovative techniques about cooperation between teams of human agents and teams of mobile robotic agents and collaborative context awareness.
The scope of security operations has been changing rapidly for the past few years. Nowadays, the threats for citizens of developed countries arising from classical military conflicts are decreasing but, on the other hand, there has been a strong increase in the need to respond effectively to catastrophic, unexpected incidents, including natural and civil disasters (e.g., collapses, fires, floods and earthquakes), industrial accidents or technological disasters (e.g., accidents in nuclear reactors, refineries, etc.), and terrorism acts and crime (e.g., bomb attacks). Current security organizations are facing shortage in specialized dedicated equipment, which leads to extreme exposure to risk of human lives within search and rescue teams and ineffective victim assistance within civil population.
From the standpoint of economic and social development, the CHOPIN project will contribute to increase the safety of human rescuers and potential victims, and to attain faster, more precise, and cost effective response to catastrophic incidents, through the use of teams of mobile robotic agents in cooperation with teams of human rescuers, a.k.a. first responders in the context of security operations. Robotic technology can support first responders in most dangerous or repetitive actions during crisis operations, by taking advantage of robots' expendability. It enables rescue teams to concentrate resources on core activities without or with limited stress arising from life endangerment. Dealing with terrorist bomb threats in public areas, search and rescue (SaR) and infrastructural assessment in partially collapsed buildings (e.g., degraded old buildings, buildings damaged after an explosion or a seismologic phenomenon), SaR in urban fires, spill of dangerous substances and leakage of toxic gases in industrial facilities, etc., are examples of scenarios that will be used to validate the project's scientific contributions. The human-robot system to be studied within this project will comprise basically hand-held devices (HHD) to be worn by first responders and provide them with effective and augmented situation awareness, and mobile robots (MR), which assist first responders in performing security missions.
Cooperation in MRS has been deeply studied by roboticists for the past two decades. However, there is still a gap on studying the cooperative interaction between teams of cooperative mobile robots and teams of humans, which the CHOPIN project aims to exploit. Although the study of cooperation in the interface of those teams can resemble some problems of MAS in the scope of Artificial Intelligence, several challenging scientific problems remain unsolved when that cooperation must take place in real implementations with human and robotic agents. The most important one is the efficient sharing of information through information utility assessment, as massive inter-agent communication is impractical, either because of communication channel's limited bandwidth or overwhelming information processing on each agent. Another relevant scientific problem is collaborative context awareness and context sharing between team of humans and team of robots. Human and robotic agents must be able to create a common interface to attain a correct and common interpretation of shared information given the current shared context. Building global awareness from local awareness, i.e. imprecise and incomplete information, and developing context recognition techniques for robotic devices are other subsidiary interesting research issues.
In summary, the CHOPIN project will focus on the following scientific goals:
• SO1. Architectures and models for cooperation in teams of humans and in teams of mobile robots;
• SO2. Collaborative context awareness and context sharing between team of humans and team of robots;
• SO3. Scalable and cooperative sharing of information based on measures of information utility assessment.
The CHOPIN project started on April 1st, 2012 and will last for 3 years. At the moment the project team decided already to focus on two specific catastrophic scenarios in urban areas, to serve as proof of concept for CHOPIN:
• Fire in a large basement garage;
• Leakage of toxic gases in an industrial plant.
The Internship
For the internship, we assume that robotic technology is used in reconnaissance and rescuing phases of the mission to assist human responders, which usually comprise firefighters and paramedics coordinated by civilian defense agencies. Multiple mobile robots can take advantage from parallelism to reduce the time required for the mission in a large garage. Since a wireless communication network may be absent or damaged, human and robotic agents will have to deploy and maintain a mobile ad hoc wireless network (MANET) for supporting interaction within the human team, within the robotic team, and between these teams. MANETs based on Wi-Fi network card interfaces will be used. This is an interesting technical solution because MANETs allow to physically connect in an ad hoc fashion a set of distributed nodes equipped with commonly available off-the-shelf wireless communication hardware, without the need for a communication backbone (e.g. wireless routers and access points). They raise however two challenges: (1) the implementation and deployment of the MANET itself and (2) multi-agent coordination to optimize the network’s connectedness. In this internship we focus on the former topic.
In a MANET, every communication node is also a router. Two basic MANET services will be implemented. Firstly, multi-hop routing is the basis for data-centric operations, but these will also enrich routing with services like location of peers. For instance, finding the location of some peer given its identifier, or finding a peer holding a first-aid kit. Secondly, providing a position and time-aware data-centric service is a natural application of previous research results of one of the team members, wherein a position-based MANET was designed to support dynamic hash tables. This MANET divides the space into a simple grid; nodes in the same cell share the responsibilities of the cell and coordinate to route and keep data. A very interesting feature of a cell-based approach is that it only requires rough localization.
The student should develop his or her work as new extensions to the ROS – Robot Operating System. These extensions will be used in other tasks of this project to provide communications in the absence of a communication infrastructure and will also be made available for the worldwide ROS community.
Objetivo
Implementation and deployment of mobile ad hoc communication networks (MANETs) for Search and Rescue Teams. Implement this solution in the Robot Operating System.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
State of the art evaluation and requirement specification (months 1-4)
During this phase, the scholar should learn the basics about wi-fi communication and about MANETS. The student should also define a set of technical requirements for his work, based on the goals of the project. More precisely, during this phase, the student must define (or adopt) the communication protocol and should define as well in which circumstances it should work and tested.
During this phase, the student must also learn the details of a network simulator (probably ns-2), to speed up the future implementation that will take place on the second semester.
Intermediate report (month 5)
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
Implementation for simulation (months 6-7)
During this phase, the student should implement the protocol in a network simulator. This step should only exist if it is indeed possible to reuse this source code for the real implementation
Implementation for ROS (months 8)
During this phase, the student should port the communication protocol for real robots.
Testing (months 9)
Test the solutions in a real scenario (although limited in size and number of robots).
Final report (month 10)
Condições
O trabalho será realizado no Departamento de Engenharia Informática, no Grupo de Software and Systems Engineering, do Centro de Informática e Sistemas da Universidade de Coimbra. As bolsas para Estagiários Licenciados têm o valor de 745 euros e terão uma duração de 6 meses.
Observações
Será dada preferência a alunos com bons resultados em disciplinas relacionadas com este trabalho (nomeadamente, Sistemas Distribuídos, Sistemas Operativos, Computação de Alto Desempenho ou Integração de Sistemas).
Orientador
Filipe Araujo
filipius@dei.uc.pt 📩