RIM Seminar - August 24 - Edwin Olson on Multiagent Ground Vehicles

The MAGIC 2010 competition asked teams of robots to collaboratively perform reconnaissance missions in a 250,000m^2 urban indoor/outdoor environment: explore the area, build a map, and recognize interesting objects--- with as little human intervention as possible. In this talk, I'll describe how our team of 14 robots won the competition and $750,000. Central challenges included inaccurate dead-reckoning information, limited communications, moving and lethal obstacles, and a scale of operation (environment size and number of robots) that pushed existing mapping algorithms to failure. Key to our systems' success was our ability to maintain a consistent coordinate frame and the ability to elicit critically useful information from the human operators while simultaneously minimizing their workload. In addition to showing cases where our system performed well, I'll describe some of the failure modes that motivate our ongoing work.