Dynamic Large-Scale Swarm Systems in Urban Environments: Results from the DARPA OFFSET Program (Submission deadline: February 1, 2022)

Individual semi-autonomous unmanned systems have already proven to be useful in a variety of use cases including movie production, agriculture, civil engineering, military operations and insurance. Likewise, small groups of unmanned systems have shown promise, particularly when coordinating to achieve a common goal. Less studied are the potential benefits of large swarms comprising hundreds of inexpensive but capable unmanned systems, largely due to the difficulties associated with creating, or even simulating, such a system. Unmanned system swarms are characterized by large numbers of platforms dynamically cooperating and rapidly adapting to changes in objectives and/or the environment. Unmanned system swarms face many complex research challenges and field-testing these swarms can be a massive undertaking. 

Since it began in 2017, DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program has envisioned future small-unit forces using swarms comprising hundreds of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) and unmanned ground systems (UGSs) collaborating to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the OFFSET program has enabled rapid development and practical field-testing of a number of emerging breakthrough capabilities in areas such as:

1. •Swarm Sensing and Perception
   

2. •Swarm System Hardware and Logistics
   

3. •Distributed Planning and Navigation
   

4. •Human-Swarm Interfaces
   

5. •Swarm Simulation at Scale
   

6. •Swarm Tactics and Tactic Development
   

7. •Swarm Communications
   

8. •Swarm System Testing and Evaluation
   

These evolving and integrated capabilities undergo regular and extensive field evaluation with increasing numbers of platforms and complexity of environments to assess current approaches under realistic field conditions. This special issue is intended to highlight the large-scale unmanned system swarm technologies developed and lessons learned in the DARPA OFFSET program, including research articles, field experiments, and hardware/software system descriptions. Researchers and evaluators who participated in the OFFSET program or utilized the technology developed by the program are encouraged to submit original papers that meet Field Robotics guidelines. We seek contributions from participating individuals and organizations describing their role and experimental results including technology providers, integrators, sprinters, evaluators and program management. The topics should address one of the research areas mentioned above or an integrated combination representing the state of the art capabilities achieved under OFFSET.

Guest editorial team:

1. •Dr. Erin Cherry, Northrup Grumman Mission Systems
   

2. •Dr. Timothy Chung, DARPA Tactical Technology Office
   

3. •Dr. Shane Clark, Raytheon BBN Technologies
   

4. •Dr. Richard Schantz, Raytheon BBN Technologies (corresponding lead guest editor)
   

5. •Mr. Kyle Usbeck, Systems and Technology Research Corporation
   

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Unmanned Marine Systems (submission closed)

This special issue focuses on state-of-the-art developments in maritime robotic systems including autonomy, control, sensing and analysis related to Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). The marine environment is extremely challenging due to the rapid attenuation of the electromagnetic spectrum and the constraints that imposes on underwater communications, sensing and navigation. Marine roboticists, thus, cannot typically rely on systems developed for land based applications but have instead focused on solutions specific to the underwater environment to address critical needs in Marine Archeology, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Fisheries, Polar Studies, Coral Reef Ecology and in the Offshore and Naval domains.

This special issue seeks to obtain a technological snapshot of the current state of research as it bears on these important issues.

As part of the stated goal of the Field Robotics journal, the special issue seeks papers on systems and algorithms that have been tested in the field as opposed to simulations.

The list of topics includes but is not limited to

1. •Vehicle Design
   

2. •Vehicle Navigation
   

3. •Sensor design and data fusion for optical, acoustic, environmental and other sensors suites.
   

4. •Autonomy for individual, multiple and heterogeneous vehicle systems
   

5. •Marine image understanding and information extraction
   

6. •Higher-level autonomy for mission planning and control
   

7. •Biologically inspired approaches to intelligent autonomy for autonomous maritime vehicles
   

8. •The applications of these systems in shallow water, the mid-water column, the deep ocean and polar environments
   

Authors are encouraged to submit multimedia attachments to the paper (data sets, models and videos) as a means of enhancing the submission.

Guest editorial team

Hanumant Singh, Northeastern University (ha.singh@northeastern.edu)

Stefan Williams, University of Sydney (stefan.williams@sydney.edu.au)

Blair Thornton, University of Southampton (B.Thornton@soton.ac.uk)

For comments, suggestions, or requests, please email any of the guest editors.

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Advancements and lessons learned during Phase I & II of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (submission closed)

The DARPA SubT Challenge (2018-2021) is aimed at deploying autonomous robot teams to explore GPS-denied underground environments with degraded wireless communications to search and report locations of predefined artifacts. This is structured as circuit events with the following:

Tunnel circuit: Man-made tunnels such as mining tunnels.
Urban circuit: Underground urban environments such as subways, sewers and industrial buildings.
Cave circuit: Natural caves

Successful deployment in these events requires research and development in rapid mapping, effective navigation, and robust systems, among many other aspects in field robotics. The tunnel circuit was held in August 2019 at the NIOSH Experimental Coal Mines in Pittsburgh, PA, and the urban circuit was held in February 2020 at the Satsop Nuclear Plant in Elma, WA.

This special issue in the Field Robotics will showcase the contributions to the state of the art in field robotics and lessons learned by the teams that competed in the concluded circuit events. This will be an opportunity for the wider robotics community to benefit from work done by the teams to push forward what is possible with autonomous field robots. We solicit original contributions that highlight the following aspects in the context of competing in the DARPA SubT Challenge systems track:

•Mechanism design

•Systems and control

•Motion planning

•Perception

•SLAM

•Multi-agent navigation

•Mission planning

Guest editorial team

Navinda Kottege (CSIRO, Team CSIRO-DATA61)

Ali Agha (JPL, Team CoStar)

Sebastian Scherer (CMU, Team Explorer)

Jan Faigl (CTU, Team CTU-CRAS-NORLAB)

Please contact navinda.kottege@csiro.au for more details.

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Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA)-- Developing Autonomous Robotic Team Members for Unstructured Environments ((submission closed)

The impressive growth of investment in driverless cars, warehouse automation, human service robots, and Artificial Intelligence applications in our daily lives is inspiring. However, the majority of this effort assumes a structured environment, which leaves significant unsolved problems for autonomous robots operating in unstructured environments. Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) funded a ten-year robotics research program called the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA), which brought together Government, Academic, and Industry robotics scientists and engineers to develop autonomous mobile robot technologies for unstructured environments. While the underlying motivation came from helping soldiers operating in unstructured environments, the benefits extend to scenarios ranging from disasters, to interplanetary exploration, to reducing reliance on extensive prior knowledge in structured environments. In 2016 the objectives of this program were refocused on a system-oriented approach that brought these four research areas together into a set of demonstrable capabilities in application scenarios.

This special issue is intended to highlight robotics technology developed in the RCTA program, including research articles, field experiments, and hardware/software system descriptions. Researchers who participated in the RCTA program over the 2010-2020 period are encouraged to submit papers that meet Field Robotics guidelines. The topics should address one of the research areas mentioned above or a combination representing field robotics capability.

Guest editorial team

Larry Matthies, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/CalTech

Cynthia Matuszek, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Aaron Johnson, Carnegie Mellon University

Monroe Kennedy III, Stanford University

Please contact dpatel1@loyola.edu for more details.

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Special Issue on MBZIRC 2020: Challenges in Autonomous Field Robotics (submission closed)

Robotics has the potential to have an impact that is as transformative as the Internet, with robotics technology poised to fuel a broad range of next-generation products and applications in a diverse array of fields. These include robot applications in disaster response, manufacturing, construction, healthcare and household chores. In the past few decades robotic competitions have been a catalyst for accelerating technological advancements in robotics and autonomous systems. The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) is a biennial robotics competition motivated by the technological challenges facing the next generation of robotics. The enabling technologies for next generation robotic applications include robots working more autonomously in dynamic, unstructured environments, while collaborating and interacting with other robots and humans. MBZIRC 2020 focused on some of these enabling technologies, by providing a demanding set of benchmark robotics challenges, and has attracted some of the best international teams. Similar to other major competitions, MBZIRC provided an environment to foster innovation and technical excellence, while encouraging entertaining performance. 

We encourage authors to submit original work developed to solve the MBZIRC 2020 Challenges. Topics of interest include robotics in unstructured, dynamic outdoor environments, sensing and perception, machine learning, mechanical design, computer architectures, communication, planning, learning, and control.

Guest editorial team

Jorge Dias,  Khailfa University

Paolo Dario, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

Lakhmal Seneviratne, Khalifa University

Oussama Khatib, Stanford UNiversity

Satoshi Tadokoro, Tohoku University

Pedro Lima, University of Lisbon