Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics

TL;DR

This paper presents a system for large-scale exploration using air-ground robot teams that leverage semantic communication and opportunistic networking, addressing unique challenges and sharing lessons learned from experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel air-ground exploration system that uses semantics as a common language and operates with opportunistic communications, which is a new approach in robotic exploration.

Findings

Successful deployment of the system in real-world experiments

Identification of key challenges in semantic-based exploration

Open-source code available for further research

Abstract

One common and desirable application of robots is exploring potentially hazardous and unstructured environments. Air-ground collaboration offers a synergistic approach to addressing such exploration challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate a system for large-scale exploration using a team of aerial and ground robots. Our system uses semantics as lingua franca, and relies on fully opportunistic communications. We highlight the unique challenges from this approach, explain our system architecture and showcase lessons learned during our experiments. All our code is open-source, encouraging researchers to use it and build upon.