RMF-Owl: A Collision-Tolerant Flying Robot for Autonomous Subterranean Exploration
This addresses the problem of autonomous exploration in confined, obstacle-filled subterranean spaces, potentially useful for search and rescue missions, though it appears incremental in combining existing capabilities.
The researchers developed RMF-Owl, a collision-tolerant flying robot for autonomous subterranean exploration, demonstrating its ability to navigate and detect objects in challenging underground environments through field experiments.
This work presents the design, hardware realization, autonomous exploration and object detection capabilities of RMF-Owl, a new collision-tolerant aerial robot tailored for resilient autonomous subterranean exploration. The system is custom built for underground exploration with focus on collision tolerance, resilient autonomy with robust localization and mapping, alongside high-performance exploration path planning in confined, obstacle-filled and topologically complex underground environments. Moreover, RMF-Owl offers the ability to search, detect and locate objects of interest which can be particularly useful in search and rescue missions. A series of results from field experiments are presented in order to demonstrate the system's ability to autonomously explore challenging unknown underground environments.