Dr. Rekleitis, Dr. Beer, and Dr. O'Kane have received an award from the NSF for their project "A Heterogeneous Team of Field Robots for Research into Coordinated Monitoring of Coastal Environments". The award will support the acquisition of a multi-robot team that can operate in coastal environments. Project Abstract:

This infrastructure proposal supports the acquisition of a multi-robot team suited for operations in coastal environments. The robot team consists of two underwater vehicles (AUVs), three surface vehicles (ASVs), as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): two fixed-wing UAVs and two quadrocopters. The target domain is the coastal waters of South Carolina. In several applications such as environmental monitoring, homeland security, resource utilization, and contamination tracking, there is a need to track a mass of water, record a set of properties, such as salinity, temperature, presence of different substances, and also record the position and boundaries of the said body. The proposed infrastructure will enable computing research for addressing the above problems. This project revolves around enabling research on several CISE research fields at the University of South Carolina, including algorithmic development for multi-robot coordination, path-planning and state estimation; planning under uncertainty; sensor fusion from different modalities; and human-robot interaction.