Snow Day

It's been another great year for ASRL and we celebrated today with our annual group lunch.  Conditions on the way back were pretty extreme, so we decided it was a good time to update our group photo.  A great reminder that we have a lot of work to do before robots are able to handle all environmental conditions!

Goodbye, Mr. Anderson

Sean Anderson successfully defended his PhD thesis on November 3rd, 2016; congrats to Dr. Anderson!  We celebrated with a nice meal at Hart House Gallery Grill and then hung out on campus for a bit.  Along the way finally got a chance to try out Rehman Merali's teaBOT loose-leaf tea robot...the tea was great and the lid is very cool since it acts as the tea strainer.

Classic Canadian Robotics

Our proposal for a data collection car wasn't funded this year so we decided to throw together a rig on a personal car instead.  We logged 50 km of Velodyne-64, stereo, and POS-LV data around the UofT main campus.  The rig was mounted on a standard roofrack with cables coming through the sunroof and power coming in via jumper cables right on the car battery.  We're resubmitting our proposal this year for a more permanent solution, but this data should get us started and the setup will inform our eventual design if/when we actually get some money.

All Night Long

We just finished an experiment this week showcasing our new Multi-Experience Localization (MEL) for use in Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R).  Using only cameras, we taught a route in bright sunlight and demonstrated that we could continue to drive exactly in our tracks all night long (with the use of headlights).  This works because we are localizing against many previous experiences all the time and we can therefore track the visual appearance change.  The image shows the Grizzly driving in its tracks well after sunset.  We're also using a drone to make videos hence the follower.

Back to Reality

ASRL Field Team [photo: Pomerleau]

Our Sudbury 2016 field campaign has come to a close and we're back in civilization.  All of our experiments were quite successful.  The Grizzly drove over 120 km using vision-only feedback, the Lancaster planes did many surveys of the site, and TReX explored two unique rock outcrops with several descents at each one.  After cleaning up all the gear, our next step is to process the 6 Tb of data we collected, post pictures, make videos, etc.  Can't wait for the next field experience!

On the Rock

We're having a great field campaign in Sudbury.  TReX, our tethered climbing robot, has completed several descents down steep terrain in order to build three-dimensional models using lidar.  The robot has performed quite well, and we've become more confident in the strength of the tether over time.  The ability to drive sideways while under tension has proven an important capability to get around obstructions such as rock bulges.  Overall, we're happy with the TReX concept and hope to make a smaller, lighter machine in the future to simplify logistics.

Sudbury Field Camp

We're back in the Ethier gravel pit in Sudbury.  We've had our camp running for 5 days now and have gotten into a good routine.  The Grizzly has passed 75 km of autonomous driving using VT&R2, TReX has explored two different rock outcrops, and our fixed-wing UAV has done an aerial survey of the pit and our camp.  The weather has taken a turn for the better so it's looking great for the next few days.

Trains are Robots, Too

Congrats to Tyler, whose paper on lidar-based train localization won best robotics paper at the conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) in Vancouver this year!

Sudbury Bound

It's been two years since we were on a big field test but we're off to live in a gravel pit in Sudbury, Ontario for two weeks, once again.  We'll be testing a new version of Visual Teach & Repeat (and plan to drive 100 km autonomously), a cliff-descending tethered robot for geological mapping, and some small fixed-wing planes for aerial surveillance.  Image on the right shows the big pile of gear we're starting to gather for our trip.  We've even got the floorplan of our office truck mocked up and have been making sure our power system will work.  Hoping for no bugs, both software and of the insect variety.