Stephen A. Rees

Harish Anand, Stephen A. Rees, Zhiang Chen et al.

Simulations play a crucial role in robotics research and education. This paper presents the OpenUAV testbed, an open-source, easy-to-use, web-based, and reproducible software system that enables students and researchers to run robotic simulations on the cloud. We have built upon our previous work and have addressed some of the educational and research challenges associated with the prior work. The critical contributions of the paper to the robotics and automation community are threefold: First, OpenUAV saves students and researchers from tedious and complicated software setups by providing web-browser-based Linux desktop sessions with standard robotics software like Gazebo, ROS, and flight autonomy stack. Second, a method for saving an individual's research work with its dependencies for the work's future reproducibility. Third, the platform provides a mechanism to support photorealistic robotics simulations by combining Unity game engine-based camera rendering and Gazebo physics. The paper addresses a research need for photorealistic simulations and describes a methodology for creating a photorealistic aquatic simulation. We also present the various academic and research use-cases of this platform to improve robotics education and research, especially during times like the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtual collaboration is necessary.

Darwin Mick, K. Srikar Siddarth, Swastik Nandan et al.

Remote sample recovery is a rapidly evolving application of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) for planetary sciences and space exploration. Development of cyber-physical systems (CPS) for autonomous deployment and recovery of sensor probes for sample caching is already in progress with NASA's MARS 2020 mission. To challenge student teams to develop autonomy for sample recovery settings, the 2020 NSF CPS Challenge was positioned around the launch of the MARS 2020 rover and sUAS duo. This paper discusses perception and trajectory planning for sample recovery by sUAS in a simulation environment. Out of a total of five teams that participated, the results of the top two teams have been discussed. The OpenUAV cloud simulation framework deployed on the Cyber-Physical Systems Virtual Organization (CPS-VO) allowed the teams to work remotely over a month during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop and simulate autonomous exploration algorithms. Remote simulation enabled teams across the globe to collaborate in experiments. The two teams approached the task of probe search, probe recovery, and landing on a moving target differently. This paper is a summary of teams' insights and lessons learned, as they chose from a wide range of perception sensors and algorithms.