Nested Marsupial Robotic System for Search and Sampling in Increasingly Constrained Environments

This paper presents a nested marsupial robotic system and its execution of a notional disaster response task. Human supervised autonomy is facilitated by tightly-coupled, high-level user feedback enabling command and control of a bimanual mobile manipulator carrying a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle that carries a miniature ground robot. Each robot performs a portion of a mock hazardous chemical spill investigation and sampling task within a shipping container. This work offers an example application for a heterogeneous team of robots that could directly support first responder activities using complementary capabilities of autonomous dexterous manipulation and mobility, autonomous planning and control, and teleoperation. The task was successfully executed during multiple live trials at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Technology Expo in June 2015. A key contribution of the work is the application of a unified algorithmic approach to autonomous planning, control, and estimation supporting vision-based manipulation and non-GPS-based ground and aerial mobility, thus reducing algorithmic complexity across this capability set. The unified algorithmic approach is described along with the robot capabilities, hardware implementations, and human interface, followed by discussion of live demonstration execution and results.