Abstract: The
MAGIC 2010 competition asked teams of robots to collaboratively perform
reconnaissance missions in a 250,000m^2 urban indoor/outdoor
environment: explore the area, build a map, and recognize interesting
objects— with as little human intervention as possible. In this talk,
I’ll describe how our team of 14 robots won the competition and
$750,000. Central challenges included inaccurate dead-reckoning
information, limited communications, moving and lethal obstacles, and a
scale of operation (environment size and number of robots) that pushed
existing mapping algorithms to failure. Key to our systems’ success was
our ability to maintain a consistent coordinate frame and the ability
to elicit critically useful information from the human operators while
simultaneously minimizing their workload. In addition to showing cases
where our system performed well, I’ll describe some of the failure
modes that motivate our ongoing work.
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