Abstract
The inaugural RobotX competition was held in Singapore in Oct. 2014. The purpose of the competition was to challenge teams to develop new strategies for tackling unique and important problems in marine robotics. The joint team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Olin College was chosen as one of 15 competing teams from five nations (USA, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Australia). The team received the surface vehicle platform, the WAM-V (Fig. 1) in Nov. 2013 and spent a year building the propulsion, electronic, sensing, and algorithmic capabilities required to complete the five tasks that included navigation, underwater pinger localization, docking, light sequence detection, and obstacle avoidance. Ultimately the MIT/Olin team narrowly won first place in a competitive field. This paper summarizes our approach to the tasks, as well as some lessons learned in the process. As a result of the competition, we have developed a new suite of open-source tools for feature detection and tracking, realtime shape detection from imagery, bearing-only target localization, and obstacle avoidance.
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Notes
- 1.
See http://robotx.mit.edu for more details and updates.
- 2.
A video of our qualification and final has been made available (http://robotx.mit.edu/fsr_video).
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Acknowledgments
The RobotX competition was supported by AUVSI and ONR. Autonomy development and autonomy test facilities used for RobotX at MIT were supported in part by Battelle Maritime Systems and the ONR, Code 311. The project was also supported by the following grants ONR N00014-13-1-0588 and N00014-14-1-0214, APS-14-12 SLIN 0001, DARPA contract No. N66001-14-C-4031, UCSD award no 43019208, and NSF Award IIS-1318392. We would also like to thank our other sponsors that contributed to the project: MIT Sea Grant, Oliver and Merideth Seikel, Chick and Sandy Corrado, CENSAM, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), The US Military Academy, and Portwell, Inc. In addition we would like to acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals: Jonathan Garcia-Mallen, Chrys Chyssostomidis, Devynn Diggins, Mindy Tieu, Shivali Chandra, Nikolay Lapin, Justin Poh, Paul Titchener, Alex Kessler, Madelin Perry, Jay Woo, Zoher Ghadyali, William Warner, Victoria Coleman, and Pat Marion.
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Anderson, A. et al. (2016). An Overview of MIT-Olin’s Approach in the AUVSI RobotX Competition. In: Wettergreen, D., Barfoot, T. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27702-8_5
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