Authors: Florian Shkurti, Anqi Xu, Malika Meghjani, Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera, Yogesh Girdhar, Philippe Giguere, Bir Bikram Dey, Jimmy Li, Arnold Kalmbach, Chris Prahacs, Katrine Turgeon, Ioannis Rekleitis, Gregory Dudek
Abstract: In this paper we describe a heterogeneous multirobot system for assisting scientists in environmental monitoring tasks, such as the inspection of marine ecosystems. This team of robots is comprised of a fixed-wing aerial vehicle, an autonomous airboat, and an agile legged underwater robot. These robots interact with off-site scientists and operate in a hierarchical structure to autonomously collect visual footage of interesting underwater regions, from multiple scales and mediums. We discuss organizational and scheduling complexities associated with multi-robot experiments in a field robotics setting. We also present results from our field trials, where we demonstrated the use of this heterogeneous robot team to achieve multi-domain monitoring of coral reefs, based on realtime interaction with a remotely-located marine biologist.