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Predicting Digging Success for Unmanned Aircraft System Sensor Emplacement

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Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2018)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 11))

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Abstract

We have developed an autonomous, digging, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) for sensor emplacement. A key challenge is quickly determining whether or not a particular digging activity will lead to successful emplacement, thereby allowing the system to potentially try another location. We have designed a first-of-its-kind decision-making algorithm using a Markov Decision Process to autonomously monitor the activity of a digging UAS activity to quickly decide if success is likely. Further, we demonstrate through many experimental trials that our method outperforms other decision-making methods with an overall success rate of 82.5%.

This material is based upon work supported by USSTRATCOM through the 55th Contracting Squadron under Contract No. FA4600-12-D-9000 and was also funded, in part, by NSF-1638099 and USDA-2017-67021-25924.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Additional details can be found in [13].

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. Sebastian Elbaum, Dr. Brittany Duncan, Andrew Rasmussen, Ajay Shankur, Jacob Hogberg, and Aaron Clare and the staff at Horning State Farm for their assistance.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

    Adam Plowcha, Carrick Detweiler & Justin Bradley

  2. Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

    Yue Sun

Authors
  1. Adam Plowcha
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  2. Yue Sun
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  3. Carrick Detweiler
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  4. Justin Bradley
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adam Plowcha .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Jing Xiao

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Torsten Kröger

  3. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib

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Plowcha, A., Sun, Y., Detweiler, C., Bradley, J. (2020). Predicting Digging Success for Unmanned Aircraft System Sensor Emplacement. In: Xiao, J., Kröger, T., Khatib, O. (eds) Proceedings of the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER 2018. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33950-0_14

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