Multi-domain monitoring of marine environments using a heterogeneous robot team

In this paper we describe a heterogeneous multi-robot system for assisting scientists in environmental monitoring tasks, such as the inspection of marine ecosystems. This team of robots is comprised of a fixed-wing aerial vehicle, an autonomous airboat, and an agile legged underwater robot. These robots interact with off-site scientists and operate in a hierarchical structure to autonomously collect visual footage of interesting underwater regions, from multiple scales and mediums. We discuss organizational and scheduling complexities associated with multi-robot experiments in a field robotics setting. We also present results from our field trials, where we demonstrated the use of this heterogeneous robot team to achieve multi-domain monitoring of coral reefs, based on real-time interaction with a remotely-located marine biologist.

I. INTRODUCTION

We present a multi-robot system developed for environmental monitoring and surveying, which operates in the aerial, water surface, and underwater domains. Our primary objective is to explore the practicality of using autonomous robots to perform environmental monitoring, for instance by helping marine scientists conduct repeated inspections in a consistent, efficient, and comprehensive manner. To this end, our heterogeneous robot team interacts with human experts remotely to identify areas of interest based on live aerial feedback, and then autonomously collects visual footage of these areas at different scales and from multiple domains.