Defence Business: Local MAGICian in the running | ADM Oct 2010
Jointly run by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) and the Research Development & Engineering Command (RDECOM) in the US, the Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) has seen the field narrowed down to six final contenders.
Katherine Ziesing | Canberra
Of the six shortlisted teams, there is a single Australian contender. Team MAGICian (Multiple Autonomous Ground-vehicle International Challenge by Intelligent Autonomous Navigators) will compete against five other teams from Turkey, Japan and the US - all vying for a share of more than US$1 million prize money - in November.
MAGICian is a joint effort between researchers and students from Flinders School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics, the University of Western Australia’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Edith Cowan University, and industry partners Thales Australia and Illiarc.
The challenge aims to improve the ability of dismounted ground forces to conduct zone reconnaissance in an urban environment by increasing safety and efficiency and reducing cost via the integration of autonomy.
It is not about sensor development or vehicle mobility, but about shifting the Unmanned Vehicle System (UVS) state-of-the-art from manual and tele-operation to partial or full autonomy.
It anticipates integration of humans and multiple UVSs to autonomously and dynamically coordinate, plan, and re-plan multi-UVS task allocation and execution strategies against changing environments whilst simultaneously providing effective situational awareness to potential users of the information.
To complete the challenge competitors must: (i) accurately and completely explore and map the challenge area; (ii) correctly locate, classify and recognise all simulated threats; and (iii) complete all phases within 3.5 hours.
The challenge will be conducted in a mock urban environment of the order of 500m x 500m and will comprise sealed roads, paths, buildings, trees, grassed areas, sandy ground, trenches, holes, safety barriers, curbs, and fences.
While exact details of the challenge area are not known to ADM at the time of writing, simulated threats will include improvised explosive devices (IEDS), toxic waste barrels, static and mobile combatants and a sniper.
“You’re allowed to have as many different robot types as you want, but you need to have at least two different robot types; the sensor vehicle and disrupter vehicle,” Dr Adrian Boeing of Team MAGICian told ADM.
“The sensor robot is responsible for doing all the mapping and tracking; the disrupter vehicle is responsible for eliminating threats, like simulated land mines for example.”
Teams are challenged to develop a cooperative collection of unmanned ground vehicles that can coordinate their activities such that they safely, efficiently and effectively explore and map an environment while detecting, locating, classifying, recognising, tracking and neutralising a number of potential Objects Of Interest (OOI).
Teams are required to have at least two different robots types with at least three robots operated by a two-person team.
The robots will have to ‘neutralise’ threats as needed.
“Neutralise is used in two different MAGIC contexts, one is for neutralising a combatant which is literally a surveillance task; so you’re actually just tracking that target visually,” Boeing said.
“With the simulated threat, you point a laser pointer for ‘neutralisation’.
“I suppose the real life equivalent to that aspect is effectively just a higher powered laser to remove the IED or whatever a threat happens to be without damaging anything else in the area.
“So we have to do a bit of a surveillance and reconnaissance task around that land mine just to make sure that no one’s going to be in that area when you do remove the threat.”
Each of the shortlisted teams have approached the challenge in their own unique way (stay tuned for the November edition of ADM for more coverage of MAGIC).
Team MAGICian has seen the WA contingent focus on the larger of the two robots, working closely with industry partner Thales Australia.
“The robot itself is based around the Pioneer AT3 platform,” Boeing explained to ADM.
“It’s basically a 40cm square base, with a total weight of 15 kilos and it’s equipped with a range of sensors.
“We’ve got a number of laser scanners, laser range finders and LIDAR – that’s like radar except with light.
“These sensors are used to detect obstacles and build maps.
“We also have instrumentation that tell us acceleration, orientation, and angular velocity inside the robots, so that’s from an inertial measurement unit and we fuse that together with data from a differential GPS, and a compass to form an overall localization system for the robot.
“We also have cameras for object tracking, 802.11 wireless mesh, and 900MHz radio communications.
“The whole robot is controlled from a dual-core embedded automotive PC.”
The team was notified of their success in November last year, which meant they had less than a year to get the platform up and running.
The majority of the sensor suite on the platform is made up of off the shelf components, mainly from the US.
“We certainly took the path of least resistance, which is to use as many off-the-shelf components as possible,” Boeing said.
“In fact every single bit of hardware is pretty much off-the-shelf except for the emergency stop system which we custom built.”
Most of the difficulties in the integration work have not been the physical presence of the robot but the software side of the equation.
Boeing explains that working with Thales has been a key to their success on this front.
Using Data Distributions Service software has made the task much easier in terms of overall architecture and planning.
“The human machine interface that WAMBOT [the robot produced by the WA contingent rather than the Flinders team] uses is the same as the ground management system that the Australian Army uses in the Tiger ARH and the MRH90,” Aidan Morgan, a Thales Australia software system engineer and WAMBOT team member told ADM.
The testing and reporting regime has received support from Ansaldo STS with Boeing citing their industry partners as keeping the academic side of the team grounded in terms of schedule.
“Right now what keeps me up at night is our schedule,” Boeing laughs.
“Just making sure we get everything done on time.
“This is what keeps me up at night; it’s a very, very tight deadline again.
“We were notified in August and we have to have everything done in November, so it’s quite a tight deadline.
“But in terms of the challenge itself, we’re actually relatively confident about the general set-up.”