Gabriele Ferri1, Fausto Ferreira2
1ERL Emergency 2019 Director 2OES AdCom 2018–2020
Background
NATO-STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) has been organizing robotics competitions since 2010. The Student AUV Challenge—Europe (SAUC-E), the premier European student competition for underwater vehicles, started in 2006 and has been organized by CMRE since 2010. This is a realistic competition as it is set in CMRE’s sea basin in open water with real-life conditions: turbidity, tides and waves. Initially, this competition was dedicated to AUVs only, but since 2013, Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) could participate for collaborative tasks. One interesting aspect, and a way of promoting collaboration among teams, is that this task could be performed with an AUV and an ASV belonging to different teams. This could bring points for both teams and it was a way to push cooperation between heterogeneous robots and between teams. Along the years we have been increasing the complexity of the tasks, pushing for more autonomy and cooperative behaviors. Initially among marine vehicles, then since 2015 including other domains.
The experience gathered with the organization of SAUC-E led CMRE to be part of the euRathlon European Union (EU) project in which CMRE was the local organizer of the first world’s multi-domain (air, sea, land) robotics competition in 2015, the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge in Piombino, Italy. For the first time in the robotics world, a competition required aerial, marine and land robots to cooperate in tasks such as valve closing, finding missing workers or surveying an area. The euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge was inspired by the Fukushima nuclear plant 2011 accident and simulated a disaster area after a tsunami. While SAUC-E required a team made of at least 75% students, euRathlon allowed the participation of teams coming from industry as, being a Grand Challenge, the goal was to push the state of the art in search and rescue robotics with a real-world Challenge never attempted before.
Following the success of the euRathlon project, CMRE was also part of the RockEU2 project (2016-2018) and locally organized the second multi-domain (air, sea, land) competition named European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency 2017 competition, again in Piombino (Italy). This was followed by the ERL Emergency 2018, a land and marine robotics competition in La Spezia at CMRE’s premises and by this year’s ERL Emergency 2019, again land + marine robotics competition. In addition to this, a land + aerial robotics competition took place in Seville, Spain in February 2019.
The Concept
The European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Robots is an outdoor robotics competition funded by the European Union in the framework of the SciRoc H2020 Project. After the success of RockEU2 project (2016-2018) and the initial launch of ERL in three vibrant fields of robotics—industrial, service and emergency robots—the ongoing SciRoc EU project is extending the ERL concept to the Smart Cities environment.
In each domain, there is a set of Local and Major Tournaments and teams are ranked in different Functionality Benchmarks and Task Benchmarks. The ERL concept is novel with respect to euRathlon and SAUC-E as it divides the competition in Functionalities and Tasks and allows for benchmarking through scoring. Besides the ERL tournaments in the three domains, the SciRoc project will organize also two Major Tournaments related to robots working in Smart Cities. The first one will take place in Milton Keynes, UK, in September 2019.
The Competition
CMRE will host the annual European Robotics League (ERL)-Emergency 2019 robotics competition from 13 to 19 July, involving land and underwater cooperating robots. The teams’ selection is being finalized. Teams have to apply and produce a journal paper with a description of how they plan to tackle the different tasks. They can participate with both types of robots or come with only one domain and will be matched with another team. This process of match making, done by the organizers, fosters cross-fertilization and networking.
This year competition will be based on a Yacht accident in a harbour. This is to connect it to the Smart Cities theme. As in past years, the sea basin of CMRE’s premises will be used for the marine robots and its surroundings for land robots. This means that the limited visibility underwater makes object recognition by AUVs a very challenging task.
The Tasks
The Yacht accident scenario materialized in tasks similar to those presented in ERL Emergency 2017 and 2018. However, to push the advancement of the state of the art we have introduced new tasks or increased the difficulty level of others as in previous years. For instance, if in earlier SAUC-E, AUVs had to cross only one gate (formed by two buoys), last year we added two other gates that could change location from team’s run to the next team’s run. For the 2019 edition, in order to push real-time processing and autonomy, robots will have to move in a different pattern depending on the colour of which individual buoy. The aim of this task is to challenge the team adaptive mission planning and the robot reactive behaviors. As a competition taking place at sea with limited visibility, it is often hard to judge real-time processing/autonomy. While the organization installs a sonar that can show in real-time the positon of the vehicle, making the vehicle’s perform different movements depending on the buoy can help the difficult task of judging.
After passing through the buoys, the AUVs need to reach the disaster area and inspect the underwater pipelines. They also have to find the damaged pipe and communicate it to the land robot. An acoustic pinger also signals a leak in the damaged pipe. AUVs need to find the leak by finding acoustically the pinger. Another task that AUVs need to do is to search for a missing person underwater, represented by a realistic mannequin, as the accident and explosion threw some workers in the water.
For the land domain, typical search and rescue tasks are presented such as searching for a missing worker, area surveying and obstacle avoidance. Manipulation tasks are also included such as rubble removal, closing a valve to stop a leaking pipe on land and transporting a water bucket to put off a (simulated) fire.
Community Building and Impact
One of the important outcomes of the competitions that CMRE has been organizing for the past 10 years is the community building around the competition. This means to connect students and young engineers with companies and research institutions. While it is hard to measure this outcome, we have had many examples of students that later were hired by the competition’s organizers and sponsoring institutions/companies. Other students later became team leaders or judges, closing the loop and bringing a different perspective to the teams and judging. This community building has been done successfully for many years, mostly for the marine robotics domain and later extended to the land and aerial robotics domains. In the multi-domain competitions (land, aerial, sea), which are still unique in the robotics world, the effort is extended to disseminate robotics among the general public. Over 3000 people in total attended euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge and ERL Emergency 2017 including the parallel programs with talks and demos dedicated to the general public including workshops for young children.
Most of all, competitions act, as well as an excellent opportunity for teams with limited access to sea, to test and develop their vehicles. Over the years, we have seen the evolution of several teams that have used the competition to test new algorithms and hardware. Not only, experimental results from the competitions have been published in conferences such as OCEANS, AUV as well as in journals. This is an excellent way of disseminating the knowledge and experience acquired by the teams’ participation and at the same time can show the competition’s benefit and the state of the art advancement over the years.
None of this would have been possible without the fundamental support of the Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) and, since 2015, IEEE OES, which has been our Main Sponsor. The synergy has been explored with papers coming from the competitions being published in OES conferences and new student members signing in.
The ERL 2017 local committee receives a plaque from Dr. Bill Kirkwood in representation of IEEE OES.
Many other institutions/companies participated in the past by offering internships, products as awards or discounts. In some cases, companies borrow products in beta release to get feedback from teams and improve their products, which is a win-win situation. For this year’s edition, we again welcome the sponsorship of ‘Breaking the Surface’ (BTS) 2019, the 11th Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Marine Robotics and Applications and Blue Robotics. BTS 2019 will give out vouchers for free registrations while Blue Robotics will provide vouchers for their online store and an Echosounder as special award.
Finally, and as part of the community building, judges are an essential piece of the puzzle. We have had truly international events with judges coming not only from Europe but also from Asia and the U.S. This allows us to showcase the best of European robotics research to a wider audience and increases the exposure of teams to the international research community.
The IEEE OES committee Marine Autonomous Systems Competitions Coordination (MASC2) has been working globally to standardize student marine robotics competitions. One of the aims of MASC2 is to identify common tasks of interest for the marine community to be proposed in the different challenges. In this framework, there have been visit exchanges between ERL Emergency with other events, such as RobotX maritime challenge and the Singapore AUV Challenge (SAUVC). These relationships are crucial to create synergies between competitions around the world to improve their impact and their sustainability.
Suleman Mazhar has been working as a professor in Information & Communication Engineering at Harbin Engineering University (China) since July 2019. He did PhD from Tokyo University (Japan) and postdoctorate from Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA). He had BS-CS from FAST-NUCES (Lahore) and MS from GIK Institute (Pakistan). He is TYSP young scientist fellow (Ministry of Science & Technology China) and have won several research grants from international organizations such as DAAD (Germany), ICIMOD (Nepal), NRPU (Higher Education Commission Pakistan), WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Pakistan. His research focus is deep learning and signal processing applications for environmental monitoring, with particular focus on underwater acoustics, and marine mammal conservation. He is a reviewer for professional journals such as Journal of Acoustical Society (America), IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE Sensors Journal, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Peng Ren is a full professor with the College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China). He is the director of Qingdao International Research Center for Intelligent Forecast and Detection of Oceanic Catastrophes. He received the K. M. Scott Prize from the University of York, the Natural Science award (first rank) from China Institute of Electronics, and the Eduardo Caianiello Best Student Paper Award from 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing as one co-author. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
Mohd Rizal Arshad is a full professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, where he specializes in ocean robotics technology and intelligent system. He received his B.Eng. in Medical Electronics & Instrumentation and PhD in Electronic Engineering from University of Liverpool, UK in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He completed his MSc. in Electronic Control Engineering from the University of Salford, UK in Dec 1995. He has supervised many postgraduate students and published extensively in local and international publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and was awarded IEEE OES Presidential Award in 2019.
Itzik Klein is an Assistant Professor, heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) Editorial Board. Prior to joining the University of Haifa, he worked at leading companies in Israel on navigation topics for more than 15 years. He has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and autonomous underwater vehicles.
John R. Potter (IEEE M’94, SM’02, F’18) graduated in the previous century with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge, UK studying Antarctic ice mass balance, where he spent four consecutive summers. This work helped underscore the non-linear fragility of polar ice to climate change and led to him receiving the Polar Medal from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Nick is a Visiting Fellow at the UK National Oceanographic Center, Southampton His nomination was endorsed by the Underwater Acoustics Technology Committee. He had worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer at University of Birmingham and has been working as a Research Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin. He has also served as a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research Global. He is a senior member of IEEE (OES) and a Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Nick has also been serving as Assoc. Editor for IEEE JoE and JASA. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise are seabed acoustics, parametric array modeling, sonar beamformer, underwater signal processing.
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.
He has developed various types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and related application technologies including navigation methods, a new sensing method using a chemical sensor, precise seafloor mapping methods, a precise seabed positioning system with a resolution of a few centimeters, a new sensing system of the thickness of cobalt-rich crust; and more. He has shown, by using these technologies that AUVs are practicable and valuable tools for deep-sea exploration.
Donna Kocak has had an outstanding career in defense and scientific projects developing and applying solutions in subsea optics, imaging and robotics. She graduated with an M.Sc in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of Central Florida; an MBA in 2008 from the University of Florida; and M.Sc in Industrial Engineering in 2011 from the University of Central Florida. She is currently a Senior Scientist, Advanced Concepts Engineering, and Fellow at the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, where she has developed novel optical imaging and communication solutions for under-sea defense and scientific projects. Prior to 2008 Donna Kocak was Founder and President of Green Sky Imaging, LLC (GSI) who developed laser/video photogrammetry software for underwater inspection and survey. Her earlier career positions were with Naval Training Systems Center, Florida; Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Florida; eMerge Interactive; and the Advanced Technologies Group in Florida.
John Potter has a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics from Bristol University in the UK and a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography from the University of Cambridge on research in the Antarctic, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal in 1988. John has worked on polar oceanography, underwater acoustics, ambient noise (including imaging), marine mammals, communications, IoUT, autonomous vehicles and strategic development. He has 40 years’ international experience working at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK, NATO in Italy, SIO in California, NUS in Singapore and most recently at NTNU in Norway. John is a Fellow of the IEEE and MTS, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturer, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer & an International Fellow of the Explorer’s Club.
Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.