Informed Scientific Sampling in Large-scale Outdoor Environments
Friday, November 8 in Room LG-R20
In this workshop, we aim to discuss recent progress in the field of robotic sampling for monitoring large-scale outdoor environments such as forests, bodies of water, agricultural fields, and complex urban settings. This workshop is aimed at providing an overview of the research related to field robotics. We plan to discuss a series of research issues that span theoretical, design, and applied topics such as: measurement acquisition and evaluation, building robust field robots, multi-robot teams, environmental monitoring. Regardless of the topic, all of these tasks aim at efficient and robust information acquisition with autonomous or semi-autonomous technology.
Schedule
| Time | Talk | Speaker | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:55 | Introduction and Opening Remarks | ||
| 9:00 | Invited | Chanyeol Yoo (UTS) | Decentralised Multi-Robot Active Perception in Outdoor Environments |
| 9:35 | Contributed | Victoria Preston (MIT) | Information-Guided Robotic Maximum Seek-and-Sample in Partially Observable Continuous Environments |
| 9:50 | Contributed | Youngsun Kwon (KAIST) | Adaptive Kernel Inference for Dense and Sharp Occupancy Grids |
| 10:00 | Contributed | Nare Karapetyan (U of South Carolina) | Coverage of Rivers with an Autonomous Surface Vehicles |
| 10:10 | Invited | Stefan Williams (U of Sydney) | Challenges in Deploying Robust Autonomy for Robotic Exploration in Marine Environments |
| 10:45 | Coffee Break and Poster Session | ||
| 11:15 | Invited | Ágata Alveirinho Dias (USJ) | Diving into the unknown: robotics as tools to study the deep-sea |
| 11:50 | Contributed | Martin J Schuster (DLR) | Towards Heterogeneous Robotic Teams for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Lunar and Planetary Environments |
| 12:05 | Invited | Thomas Stastny (ETH Zurich) | Monitoring Glaciers Beyond the Horizon |
| 12:45 | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:00 | Contributed | Alberto Quattrini Li (Dartmouth College) | Computational methods and autonomous robotics systems for modeling and predicting harmful cyanobacterial blooms |
| 2:15 | Invited | Koay TeongBeng and Rajat Mishra (NUS) | Exploring the use of simple robots with informative path planning for complex outdoor environment |
| 2:50 | Contributed | Robert F Codd-Downey (York) | Monitoring Re-Growth of Invasive Plants using an Autonomous Surface Vessel |
| 3:00 | Contributed | Larkin L Heintzman (Virginia Tech) | Anticipatory Human-Robot Path Planning for Search and Rescue |
| 3:10 | Invited | Lantao Liu (Indiana U) | Multi-Objective Tree Search for Spatiotemporal Informative Planning |
| 3:45 | Coffee Break and Poster Session | ||
| 4:15 | Invited | Greg Dudek (McGill) | Creating Effective and Useful Robots for Scientific Data Collection |
| 4:45 | Activity | Organizers | Collaborative Activity (with prize!) |
| 5:00 | Panel Discussion |
Topics of interest for this workshop:
Informed Sampling
- Active sampling
- Informed path planning
- Trade-offs between exploration and exploitation
- Data transfer between tasks and developing meaningful priors
Field Robotics
- Field robotic applications: aerial, urban, forest, marine, etc
- Designing robotic systems for challenging environments
- Sensor networks
- Multi-robot coordination
- Large-scale mapping
- Mapping with scientific sensors
- Sensor fusion for robust decision-making and navigation
Sensing Applications
- Pollution monitoring
- Environment sensing
- Cities and humans
- Search and rescue
- Disaster recovery
- Wildlife tracking
- Collaborating with domain experts
- Interpreting and presenting scientific data
Organizing Committee
Sandeep Manjanna, McGill University
Gregory Dudek, McGill University and Samsung AI Center
Johanna Hansen, McGill University
Oscar Pizarro, The University of Sydney
Victor Zykov, Cornell University
Program Committee
Alberto Quattrini Li, Dartmouth College
David Meger, McGill University
Felipe Gonzalez, Queensland University of Technology
Ioannis Rekleitis, University of South Carolina
Johanna Hansen, McGill University
Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera, McGill University
Mandar Chitre, National University of Singapore
Ryan N. Smith, Fort Lewis College
Sandeep Manjanna, McGill University
Travis Manderson, McGill University
Contact Us
Send inquiries to scientific.sampling.robots[at]gmail[dot]com