Kanna Rajan
Visiting Professor, FEUP, University of Porto
January 16, 2015
Abstract
Ocean Sciences the world over is at a cusp, with a move from the Expeditionary to the Observatory mode of doing science. Recent policy decisions in the United States, are pushing the technology for persistent observation and sampling which hitherto had been either economically unrealistic or unrealizable due to technical constraints. With the advent of ocean observatories, a number of key technologies have however proven to be promising for sustained ocean presence. In this context robots will need to be contextually aware and respond rapidly to evolving phenomenon, especially in coastal waters due to the diversity of atmospheric, oceanographic and land-sea interactions not to mention the societal impact they have on coastal communities. They will need to respond by exhibiting scientific opportunism while being aware of their own limitations in the harsh oceanic environment. Current robotic platforms however have inherent limitations; pre-defined sequences of commands are used to determine what actions the robot will perform and when irrespective of the context. As a consequence not only can the robot not recover from unforeseen failure conditions, but they’re unable to significantly leverage their substantial onboard assets to enable scientific discovery.
To mitigate such shortcomings, we have designed, built, tested and deployed deliberative techniques to dynamically command low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and more recently with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with deep roots in work to command and control deep space probes for NASA. Our effort is aimed to use a blend of generative and deliberative Artificial Intelligence Planning and Execution techniques to shed goals, introspectively analyze onboard resources and recover from failures with the goal of providing tools and techniques for observing the evolving conditions in our oceans. With the advanced tool sets for commanding vehicles from the Univ. of Porto and working in collaboration with the Portuguese Navy and with colleagues in biology and ecology from Norway and Spain, we have begun to take critical steps towards such coordinated oceanographic observations using aerial, surface and underwater vehicles towards unstructured exploration of the subsea environments that are a rich trove of problems for autonomous systems. This work is a continuum of efforts from research at NASA to command deep space probes and Mars rovers, the lessons of which we have factored into the oceanic domain. In this talk I will articulate the challenges of working in this hostile underwater domain, lay out the differences and motivate our architecture for goal-driven autonomy on AUV’s and UAVs for dual-use exploration and surveillance.
Speaker Biography
Kanna is a Visiting Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Univ. of Porto affiliated with the Underwater Systems Technology Lab. Till recently he was the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (
http://www.mbari.org) a privately funded non-profit Oceanographic institute which he joined in October 2005. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist for the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Area at NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, California.
At NASA Ames, he balanced programmatic and technical responsibilities. He was the Principal Investigator of the MAPGEN Mixed-Initiative Planning effort to command and control the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the surface of the Red Planet. MAPGEN continues to be used to this day, twice daily in the mission-critical uplink process at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Kanna was one of the six principals of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) team, which designed, built, tested and flew the first closed-loop AI based control system on a spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's 1999 Software of the Year, the agency's highest group technical award (
ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/planning-and-scheduling/remote-agent) which included CMU.
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