Story of CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team. Participating labs: VRAS, ComRob, MRS, NORLab.

Open source codes

During our participation in SubT Challenge, we developed and released a bunch of SW packages. They were deployed on both System and Virtual systems.

• NORLAB ICP mapper. Look for packages libpoint_matcher, libpointmatcher_ros, norlab_icp_mapper and norlab_icp_mapper_ros.
• MRS UAV packages. Many packages for control and perception of UAVs.
• VRAS UGV packages. Several packages, also system-related.

Publications

• Main system paper: Rouček, T., Pecka, M., Čížek, P., Petříček, T., Bayer, J., Šalanský, V., Azayev, T., Heřt, D., Petrlík, M., Báča, T., Spurný, V., Krátký, V., Petráček, P., Baril, D., Vaidis M., Kubelka, V., Pomerleau, F., Faigl, J., Zimmermann, K., Saska, M., Svoboda, T., & Krajník, T. (2022). System for multi-robotic exploration of underground environments CTU-CRAS-NORLAB in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Field Robotics, 2, 1779–1818. PDF. doi.org/10.55417/fr.2022055

• Petrlík, M., Petráček, P., Krátký, V., Musil, T., Stasinchuk, Y., Vrba, M., Báča, T., Heřt, D., Pecka, M., Svoboda, T., and Saska, M. (2023). UAVs Beneath the Surface: Cooperative Autonomy for Subterranean Search and Rescue in DARPA SubT. Field Robotics, 3, 1-68. PDF, doi.org/10.55417/fr.2023001
• List of related publications. CTU-CRAS-NORLAB-DARPA-SubT-publications

Datasets

• Final Event (all robots with 3D lidars; ctu-robot = tracked, norlab-marmotte-dell = tracked, husky-robot = wheeled, spot-* = quadruped, red/blue/green = quadrotor)
• Urban Circuit (more data) (ctu-robot/dfki-robot/tno-robot = tracked with 2D swiveling lidars, norlab-husky = wheeled with 3D lidar)
• Tunnel Circuit (more data) (ctu-robot and dfki-robot = tracked + swiveling 2D lidar, husky-robot = wheeled + 3D lidar)

Final Event

• We won 2nd place in Virtual and ended 6th in System challenges. Summary page.
• Faculty cover page. Fresh info, links to video materials, …
• We are advancing to the top 10 teams in the Virtual Event.
• We have qualified to the system challenge.
• And also to the Virtual challenge. Modeling robots.

Urban Challenge

Yes, we were at UrbanCircuit, Feb 18-27, 2020. Our partners from NORLAB was there as well. tweets from the event.

We scored again and plan to go to the Cave and final Grand Challenge which will include all three environments. We have several research topics including multi-robot exploration, path execution, robot autonomy. We are hiring students at all levels, master, PhD.

Tunnel Challenge

Talk about our story so far. MESAS 2019 paper [pdf]

In the Tunnel-Circuit, we finished 3rd among 11 teams, and 1st among teams without DARPA funding winning thus the prize award, see the DARPA official anouncement.

We thank project Research Center Informatics (RCI) for its generous support, RoboSense for lending us their Lidar, JettyVision for helping us to keep our tracked robots operational, NORLab for helping with the mapping, and also to our departments Cybernetics and Computer Science for their excellent admin support and inspiring working environment. We thank the Czech Science Foundation for funding basic research, which application led to our success, within projects No 17-08842S “Robust motion planning and control on rough unstructured terrain”, No 17-27006Y “Spatio-temporal representations for life-long mobile robot navigation”. And thanks also go to EU for its support of NIFTi and TRADR project because we learned a lot what we need at the Challenge, now. We thank also to our colleagues from the Robotic perception group at CIIRC for sharing the tracked robots with us and long cooperation.

Check the tweets for some impressions from the event.

Data: we collected quite a number of bag-files. Look, download and play.

Media coverage: Czech TV [Studio 6 2019-09-12, Udalosti-News, for download 2019-09-11], Lupa.cz, …

Our team CTU-CRAS qualified to the STIX event of DARPA SubTerranean Challenge. We plan to go to all phases of the system track.

Students participation welcome. Projects, Bachelor, Diploma theses. Come and see us at our labs: VRAS, MRS, ComRob.

STIX impressions

Flying inside the mine and above it:

A mapping and detection run:

More words, photos, at MRS group page.

Supported by:

• Research Center Informatics http://rci.cvut.cz
• Department of Cybernetics http://cyber.felk.cvut.cz
• Department of Computer Science http://cs.felk.cvut.cz
• Czech Science Foundation by project 20-29531S Autonomous time-critical exploration of communication and perception constrained environment by team of robots.

The team (random order): Tomas Svoboda, Karel Zimmermann, Jan Faigl, Tomas Krajnik, Martin Saska, Vojta Salansky, Tomas Petricek, Martin Pecka, Teymur Azayev, Jan Bayer, Tomas Roucek, Petr Cizek, Daniel Hert, Vit Kratky, Vladimir Kubelka, Matej Petrlik, Pavel Petracek.