Researchers from the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab (RISLab) at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and the National Robotics and Engineering Center (NREC) have received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) 2024 for their work titled Rapid quadrotor navigation in diverse environments using an onboard depth camera. SSRR hosts some of the top research in robotics technologies that prioritize human safety and disaster mitigation. This year’s symposium, held in New York City, brought together experts from academia, industry and government to discuss cutting-edge developments in the field.
The winning paper develops autonomous navigation in hazardous environments using a lightweight perception system and motion-primitives based planning. Authors Jonathan Lee, Abhishek Rathod, Kshitij Goel, John Stecklein, and Wennie Tabib also address key challenges that affect multirotor vehicles and provide critical advancements that promise to significantly improve deployments of these vehicles in search and rescue environments such as caves, forests and tunnels.
The team performed extensive evaluations with both simulated environments and real-world flight tests using a custom built quadrotor platform. Field tests included environments such as a cave in Kentucky and underneath a forest canopy. All navigation tasks were performed autonomously onboard the quadrotor equipped with an NVIDIA Orin AGX and forward-facing depth camera. During flight trials, over 500 meters of terrain were covered at speeds up to 6 meters per second.
The implications of the team’s research extend beyond academic achievement, with potential applications in disaster response, military operations and urban safety. By addressing real-world challenges in robotics, the work underscores the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in achieving technological breakthroughs.
The full paper provides an in-depth presentation of the team’s findings. The accompanying video demonstrates the technology in action.
For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu
(From left to right) Abhishek Rathod and Jonathan Lee accept the best paper award.
Field trials were conducted in diverse environments including a cave in Kentucky.