Cooperative Ground/Air Fleet
A volcano is formed when superheated magma surfaces from beneath the Earth's crust.
Volcanic eruptions can displace nearby settlements and cause changes in weather disrupting air travel, reducing air quality, and causing famines.
Scientists called volcanologists try to predict volcanic activity by studying local seismic activity, as well as collecting gas, lava, ash, and soil samples.
The study of volcanoes can be inherently dangerous: The area surrounding a volcano may be affected by environmental hazards such as toxic gases, lava flows, pyroclastic flows, lahars, jökulhlaups and landslides or debris avalanches. [1]
A volcanologist collecting a sample from an active volcanic lava flow.
We built a cooperative group of autonomous robots to help volcanologists safely and remotely collect data from volcanic craters.
Lavabot consists of ground vehicle Nana and hexacopter Io.
Ground vehicle Nana acts as an autonomously mobile recharge platform and ground station, but is limited to navigating relatively smooth terrain due to its weight.
Hexacopter Io can easily fly over rough terrain, but struggles with limited battery life. Io collects samples from the volcano and acts as an advance scout for Nana, in order to find clear paths to advance.
Our vehicles
Ground Vehicle Nana
Hexacopter Io
Landing rig reel designs
I led a group of 6 students [2] 2017-2018 to build these two vehicles and write autonomy software to power them. The project ended when the sponsoring professor left.
Nana is a tank-style ground vehicle equipped with Pixhawk and ODROID processors, as well as a camera, GPS, and an array of 6 IR sensors. Nana was able to navigate autonomously to GPS waypoints and detect and avoid obstacles using IR.
Io is a hexacopter equipped with Pixhawk and ODROID processors, as well as a GPS and FLIR temperature-detecting camera. Io was able to fly autonomously to GPS waypoints and land on stationary April Tags. We designed several prototype reels to allow Io to land on a scaled up Nana safely.
Because lava exudes heat, it isn't safe for Io to approach beyond a certain distance. Thus, we additionally worked on prototype mechanisms to collect samples from a distance.
Public Project Artifacts
YouTube: Autonomous Landing Live Demo
YouTube: Autonomous Navigation Indoors using IR
References
[1] British Geological Survey. 2012. Geohazard note: volcanic hazards. British Geological Survey.
[2] Jamie Cho ('19), Justin Kunimune ('19), Jingyi Xu ('19), Yijiang Chen ('18), Paul Nadan ('18), Meaghen Sausville ('18)