Category: ‘Post’

TRADR Joint Exercise (T-JEx) in Prague, Czech Republic

1 July, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

 

The TRADR Joint Exercise (T-JEx) 2016 took place in July 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic, organized by the TRADR partners in collaboration with end-users from firebrigades from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The location was the CTU campus. Over the course of a week a range of integration sessions, exercises and tests took place in order to integrate various functionalities developed by the TRADR partners, and assess the performance of the TRADR system.

This resulted in more integration of various components developed by partners, along with the successful deployment of some new features in a mission-like environment. Examples of these were e.g. autonomous navigation by UGVs based on local traversability map, the recording and building of maps in a first sortie, and subsequently loading and using this map for UGV navigation in following sorties. In addition, experience was gained in executing a mission with three UGVs at the teams disposal, which posed a considerable increase in complexity, also because of the increased functionalities that the UGVs were capable of.

Overall the exercise was very useful, as it enabled the team to test the aforementioned features outside of a lab-setting, thus marking an incremental step towards a more mature system.

 

 

 

2nd TRADR General Assembly at ETH in Zurich

6 April, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

Announcement: euRathlon – TRADR Summer School, August 22-26, 2016 in Oulu, Finland

30 March, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

Eurathlon_SummerSchool

The euRathlon/TRADR Workshop and Summer School 2016 on Heterogeneity in Robotics Systems is designed as a five-day course to provide participants with both theoretical and practical insight in multi-domain real robotic systems for deployment in disaster response scenarios.  The trend in this area is going towards multi-robot systems with different outfits, processing powers and operation spaces (ground, water, air) that shall be deployed over long periods and several sorties. This raises many challenges, including multi-modal heterogeneous mapping, semantic analysis and reasoning, (collaborative) planning under uncertainty.  The summer school program will consist of lectures on these topics, and hands-on sessions during which the participants work on practical tasks using several robots with different sensory equipment. The intended audience is undergraduate students, Master students, PhD students, postdoc students, researchers from universities/organizations and engineers from industry companies around the world.

 

The summer school is jointly organised by EURATHLON and TRADR EU Horizon 2020 and FP7 projects, respectively.

Organisers

Juha Röning (University of Oulu, Finland)
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová (DFKI, Germany)

Marta Palau Franco (UWE Bristol, UK)

Abel Gawel (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

Renaud Dubé (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

 

Summers school venue

Oulu, Finland, at the University of Oulu. www.oulu.fi

Pentti Kaiteran katu 1, 90014 Oulu, Finland.

 

Important dates

– Application deadline                          31 May 2016

Notification of acceptance:               3 June 2016
– Registration deadline:                       15 June 2016
– Summer school kick-off:               22 August 2016

Submission guidelines

Applications should be submitted via email in PDF format to Prof Juha Röning (eurathlon@uwe.ac.uk). All applicants must provide a free format letter (max. 2 pages) describing their research. Papers/posters are not compulsory for attending the summer school, but participants who have submitted a paper will have priority over participants who haven not submitted one.

  • Registration fee with accommodation: 230€/person
  • Registration fee without accommodation: 60€/person

Students enrolled in EU Universities, EU Research Centres or EU Companies have the possibility of getting travel support.


 

 

TRADR Year 2 Review in Dortmund, Germany

16 March, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

The TRADR Year 2 review took place in Dortmund (Germany) on Wednesday March 16 and Thursday March 17. On Wednesday the consortium presented its scientific results and on Thursday we demonstrated the integrated system at Phönix Phönix West, an abandoned furnace. The integrated system showcased Y2 work, with emphasis on persistence. The demonstration mission was carried out by a team consisting of a mission commander, a team leader, two UGVs each with an operator and one UAV with an operator and a pilot. One of the UGVs had a camera-equipped arm. The human team members operated remotely from a command truck, except for the UAV pilot in line of sight. The team assessed a part of the building, searched for victims and sources of potentially dangerous materials. The UAV was used for initial overview and subsequent search on the outside, the UGVs explored multilevel terrain inside, partially obstructed by smoke. Main focus was on acquiring and sharing situation awareness among team members across multiple sorties and across team shifts. The robots mapped the environment, provided a video feed and were used to take photos. The human team members were equipped with interfaces presenting them information according to their role(s). Team communication and information about the progress of the mission were collected and accessible in a mission reporting tool. We demonstrated various partial autonomy features designed to facilitate the human operators’ task, including terrain profile estimation from interoceptive sensing, adaptive traversability to automatically control the UGV flippers, a novel free-look control mode for the UGV, virtual bumpers on the UAV. Finally, a mixed-initiative path planning approach and a novel mapping framework designed to support persistence and decrease computational load were also presented. The overall progress of the project was evaluated by the predicate “very good”.
TRADR_GroupPhoto_02

Introducing TRADR

14 January, 2014 Posted by tradr_admin

TRADR is an integrated research project funded by the EU FP7 Programme, ICT: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics (Project Nr. 60963).

Using a proven-in-practice user-centric design methodology, TRADR develops novel S&T for human-robot teams to assist in disaster response efforts, over multiple missions: The novel S&T makes experience persistent. Various kinds of robots collaborate with human team members to explore the environment, and gather physical samples. Throughout this collaborative effort, TRADR enables the team to gradually develop its understanding of the disaster area over, multiple possibly asynchronous missions (persistent environment models), to improve team members’ understanding of how to work in the area (persistent multi-robot action models), and to improve team-work (persistent human-robot teaming).