Simplified Urban Search & Rescue

The final project is inspired by the challenge of autonomous robotics for Urban Search and Rescue (US&R). In US&R after a disaster occurs, a robot is used to explore an unknown environment, such as a partially collapsed building, and locates trapped or unconscious human victims of the disaster. The robot builds a map of the collapsed building as it explores, and places markers in the map of where the victims are located. This map is then given to trained First Responders who use it to go into the building and rescue the victims.

In order to simplify the above challenge, the map of the unknown disaster environment is already assumed to exist and the human victims are replaced by ArUco markers which encode the pose of that location. There are 2 robots (TurtleBot3 Waffle) - Explorer and Follower. The explorer robot first navigates around the environment and looks for the ArUco markers (a.k.a victims). It saves the location information of these markers and later shares them with the follower robot, whose task is to 'rescue' the victims based on this shared information. Only the explorer robot is capable of detecting the 'victims'.

Final Project for the course ENPM809Y: Introductory Robot Programming (Fall 2021).

Team Members

• Kumara Ritvik Oruganti (UID: 117368963) [email protected]
• Adarsh Malapaka (UID: 118119625) [email protected]
• Venkata Sai Ram Polina (UID: 118436579) [email protected]

Demo

Simulation

The below video corresponds to the demo of the search and rescue task with the ArUco locations as provided by the course instructor.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUnzQA4Owg

Testing

The below video corresponds to the demo of the search and rescue task with the ArUco locations as custom defined by the team in order to validate our implementation with different test cases.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_4cfe7u9H8

ArUco Marker Locations

The locations of the ArUco markers for the simulation and test cases are shown below.

Location	ArUco ID	Xsim (m)	Ysim (m)	Xtest (m)	Ytest (m)
1	0	-1.752882	3.246192	-1.192846	2.821559
2	1	-2.510293	1.125585	-2.510293	1.125585
3	3	-0.289296	-1.282680	-0.289296	-1.282680
4	2	-7.710214	-1.716889	7.710214	-1.716889

Report

Course Instructor Feedback

• This is a very good report, which can be considered to be published in a conference. All the important aspects of the project have been highlighted. - Very good attention to detail and lots of efforts put into the report. - Your "Testing Phase" section is very informative and very well detailed. - Lots of efforts were put in Figure 15. - Some other groups lost points for including figures in their reports and not referencing the figures in the text. I'm glad you did not take this route. - One advice, avoid using "we" or "our" in your report as this is frown upon. Rewrite your sentences using the past tense if you can. For instance: Change "Due to this problem, we stopped with only changing one ArUco position" to "Due to this problem, only changing one ArUco position was performed..." - Finally one team who could get "ArUco" right.

Developer Documentation

Dependencies

• ROS Melodic (roscpp) or ROS Noetic (roscpp)
• TurtleBot3
• aruco_detect
• fiducial_msgs
• tf2
• move_base

Run the install.bash script inside the script directory in the package to install all necessary packages.

Running the Codes

1. Open a terminal and clone the repository in the src directory of your ROS catkin workspace into a folder/package called urban_search_rescue.

source /opt/ros/<your-ros-distro>/setup.bash
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/adarshmalapaka/urban-search-and-rescue.git urban_search_rescue
cd ..
catkin_make 

2. To start the Gazebo World, RViz, spawn robots and set parameters on the Parameter Server:
   • In a terminal:

     source /opt/ros/<your-ros-distro>/setup.bash
     source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
     roslaunch urban_search_rescue multiple_robots.launch
     

3. To run the search and rescue ROS node:
   • In another terminal

     source /opt/ros/<your-ros-distro>/setup.bash
     source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
     rosrun urban_search_rescue urban_search_rescue_node 
     

Package Structure

urban_search_rescue
├─ CMakeLists.txt
├─ LICENSE
├─ README.md
├─ doc
│  ├─ Doxyfile
│  └─ html
├─ final_project_G9-Report.pdf
├─ final_project_fall2021.pdf
├─ include
│  └─ usar.h
├─ launch
│  ├─ explorer_amcl.launch
│  ├─ explorer_move_base.launch
│  ├─ follower_amcl.launch
│  ├─ follower_move_base.launch
│  ├─ mapping
│  │  ├─ bringup.launch
│  │  ├─ start_amcl.launch
│  │  ├─ start_mapping.launch
│  │  └─ start_navigation.launch
│  ├─ multiple_robots.launch
│  ├─ navigation.launch
│  ├─ single_robot.launch
│  └─ start_world.launch
├─ maps
│  ├─ final_world.pgm
│  ├─ final_world.yaml
│  ├─ final_world2.pgm
│  └─ final_world2.yaml
├─ models
│  ├─ aruco_marker_0
│  ├─ aruco_marker_1
│  ├─ aruco_marker_2
│  └─ aruco_marker_3
├─ package.xml
├─ param
│  ├─ aruco_lookup.yaml
│  ├─ base_local_planner_params.yaml
│  ├─ costmap_common_params_explorer.yaml
│  ├─ costmap_common_params_follower.yaml
│  ├─ dwa_local_planner_params.yaml
│  ├─ global_costmap_params_explorer.yaml
│  ├─ global_costmap_params_follower.yaml
│  ├─ local_costmap_params_explorer.yaml
│  ├─ local_costmap_params_follower.yaml
│  ├─ move_base_params.yaml
│  └─ real_aruco_poses.yaml
├─ rviz
│  ├─ bringup.rviz
│  ├─ mapping.rviz
│  ├─ navigation.rviz
│  └─ turtlebot3_navigation.rviz
├─ script
│  └─ install.bash
├─ src
│  ├─ main.cpp
│  └─ usar.cpp
└─ world
   ├─ aruco_marker.world
   └─ final_world.world