The Great Lakes and surrounding regions contain 20 % of the world’s fresh water, 84 % of North America’s surface fresh water, 16 000 km of coastline, 3500 species of plants and animals, and provides drinking water for 40 million people. Economically, socially, and ecologically, the Great Lakes and the thousands of lakes, rivers, and other tributaries that feed them are a significant resource to Ontario and our immediate neighbours in Canada and the US [CGLR, 2024]. Offroad Robotics researchers have been working on a growing number of projects to develop uncrewed surface vessel (USV) based technologies that support the challenges facing Canada’s aquatic resources and related industries.
Spatiotemporal Mapping
Mobile robots can readily map static environments for world building and navigation. But what if the environment is constantly changing? For researchers interested in understanding phenomena that change in both space and time, observations are vital. Current measurements techniques may require the deployment of vast arrays of sensors and manual observation campaigns by personnel, which are both slow and costly. If mobile robots can collect and synthesize data from ever-changing environments, such campaigns could be cheaper, faster, and more responsive.
T. M. C. Sears, M. R. Cooper, and J. A. Marshall. Mapping waves with an uncrewed surface vessel via Gaussian process regression. In Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), London, UK, May-June 2023. [IEEE Xplore, Preprint PDF]
T. M. C. Sears and J. A. Marshall. Mapping of spatiotemporal scalar fields by mobile robots using Gaussian process regression. In Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, October 2022. DOI: 10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981548 [Preprint PDF]
Related Publications
D. Jenkins and J. A. Marshall. This is the way: Mitigating the roll of an autonomous uncrewed surface vessel in wavy conditions using model predictive control. To appear in Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2024.
T. M. C. Sears, M. R. Cooper, S. Button, and J. A. Marshall. OtterROS: Picking and programming an uncrewed surface vessel for experimental field robotics research with ROS 2. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Field Robotics at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) on April 4, 2024. [arXiv:2404.05627]
- OtterROS code on GitHub: github.com/offroad-robotics/otter_ros
T. M. C. Sears, M. R. Cooper, and J. A. Marshall. Mapping waves with an uncrewed surface vessel via Gaussian process regression. Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), London, UK, May-June 2023. [IEEE Xplore, Preprint PDF]
T. M. C. Sears and J. A. Marshall. Mapping of spatiotemporal scalar fields by mobile robots using Gaussian process regression. In Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, October 2022. DOI: 10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981548 [Preprint PDF]
Associated Funding
This work was supported in part by the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network (NCRN), the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships program.