Autonomous Wall Building with a UGV-UAV Team at MBZIRC 2020

TL;DR

This paper presents autonomous UGV and UAV systems for wall building, capable of perceiving, locating bricks, and constructing predefined structures, demonstrated successfully at MBZIRC 2020 with insights from experiments and lessons learned.

Contribution

Development of integrated UGV-UAV systems for autonomous wall construction, combining LiDAR and visual perception for precise brick handling and placement.

Findings

Successful autonomous wall building at MBZIRC 2020

High-precision brick pose measurement with UGV LiDAR system

Real-time visual servoing with UAV for brick placement

Abstract

Constructing large structures with robots is a challenging task with many potential applications that requires mobile manipulation capabilities. We present two systems for autonomous wall building that we developed for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge 2020. Both systems autonomously perceive their environment, find bricks, and build a predefined wall structure. While the UGV uses a 3D LiDAR-based perception system which measures brick poses with high precision, the UAV employs a real-time camera-based system for visual servoing. We report results and insights from our successful participation at the MBZIRC 2020 Finals, additional lab experiments, and discuss the lessons learned from the competition.