Abstract
We report recent results from field experiments conducted with a team of ground and aerial robots toward the collaborative mapping of an earthquake damaged building. The goal of the experimental exercise is the generation of 3D maps that capture the layout of the environment and provide insight to the degree of damage inside the building. The experiments take place in the top three floors of a structurally compromised engineering building at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan that was damaged during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. We provide details of the approach to the collaborative mapping and report results from the experiments in the form of maps generated by the individual robots and as a team. We conclude by discussing observations from the experiments and future research topics.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge partial support from NSF Grant CNS-1138110, ONR Grant N00014-08-1-0696, ARL Grant W911NF-08-2-0004, the JST J-RAPID program, and the NEDO Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies. They also acknowledge Yash Mulgaonkar for the development and manufacturing of the landing pad used in the experiments.
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Michael, N. et al. (2014). Collaborative Mapping of an Earthquake Damaged Building via Ground and Aerial Robots. In: Yoshida, K., Tadokoro, S. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 92. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40686-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40686-7_3
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