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 launch of ERL in three vibrant fields of robotics: industrial, service and emergency robots, SciRoc project extends the ERL concept to Smart Cities environment.
NATO-STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) has been organizing Student AUV Challenge—Europe (SAUC-E), the premier European student competition for underwater vehicles, since 2011. SAUC-E allowed CMRE to be part of the euRathlon EU project in which CMRE organized the first world’s multi-domain (air, sea, land) robotics competition in 2015, the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge, which was inspired by the Fukushima 2011 accident. Following the success of last year’s ERL Emergency 2017 competition, which was organized by CMRE in Piombino (Italy), the Centre was once again privileged to host this year’s land + marine competition in La Spezia at CMRE’s premises.
The Competition
CMRE hosted the annual European Robotics League (ERL)-Emergency 2018 robotics competition from 14 to 20 July. It was a double domain competition where land robots and AUVs could participate. This year competition was based on a Yacht accident in a harbour connecting it to the general theme of the SciRoc project: Smart Cities. This materialized in tasks similar to those presented in ERL Emergency 2017 such as underwater structure inspection, passing though validation gates and searching for a missing person underwater, represented by a realistic mannequin. This year we added obstacle detection and avoidance and detection of a wall damage (represented by a marker) for what regards the marine domain. The land domain had also some novelties and the scenario was as challenging as in Piombino according to teams’ feedback.
As in the previous SAUC-E editions, the challenges were held at the CMRE waterfront sea basin, which is a sheltered harbor that offers participants the opportunity to handle real-life sea conditions, including limited visibility and salty water, but within a safe, controlled environment. The limited visibility added severe difficulties to object recognition by AUVs, even if the targets were bright orange or red in colour.
Nonetheless, several teams were able to tackle the tasks, mostly achieving their goals. Unfortunately, one of the teams had a major hardware fault (DVL) that could not be debugged even by the manufacturer in remote support. Out of the 4 marine teams registered, all tested their vehicles in the water. One of the teams, due to their limited experience could not accomplish much but they did learn a lot and improved their vehicle considerably. This is part of the mission of this competition: serving as a hands-on learning experience for less experienced teams. These teams might have rare access to the water and attending a challenging competition in real world conditions is an excellent opportunity to learn and validate their vehicles.
Courtesy of UNIFI Team [1].
The Participant Teams
This year we had to limit the number of teams to 8 teams (4 land and 4 sea) due to the logistics involved for a double domain competition in the La Spezia site. Due to last minute drop-outs, we had 6 teams (4 sea and 2 land) of which one had two domains. Of these, 5 had previously participated in our competitions, showing how ERL/SAUC-E is today a fixed appointment for several European research groups. Moreover, one of the teams had been away from the competition for 2 years and came back this year, which highlights that the competition can be a strong stimulus for research groups to continue working on underwater vehicle technology.
As we did for the past four years, CMRE was able to loan, without charge, one AUV robotic kit to be given to a team. As in ERL Emergency 2017, the robotic kit was the basic version of a SPARUS II AUV with a DVL. This initiative aims to expand the number of teams by providing a selected team a sort of “jump start”, since building an underwater robot is not a trivial task, and to promote rapid development and innovation. This year the chosen team was Fuerteventura BD Robotics. This team had some past experience with this robot. This year the team had very little time to practice with the robot and integrate the payload, which reflected in the performance. The SPARUS II is a success story of the past years of competitions. The platform was designed and produced based on the experience matured in previous editions and is currently commercialized by a spin-off of the University of Girona. This is the kind of technology transfer that we would like to encourage as an output of robotics competitions.
The Participant Teams Were:
- AUV Team Tom Kyle (Germany); from the University of Applied Sciences of Kiel. This team has participated since 2014 yearly in our competitions. Typically a marine team, this year, due to last minute issues with their land partner, they brought their own small land vehicle.
- Fuerteventura BD Robotics (Spain); from the company Black Display Robotics in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, Spain. This was their first participation, although part of the team members participated previously as participants in other teams.
- MSAS (Mobile Spatial Assistance System); the land MSAS land team comes from NASK company in Poland. First participation as MSAS but the same vehicle and part of the team participated previously in 2015 and 2017.
- Team Bath Marine Drones; from the University of Bath, UK. This team participated for the first time showing that the competition continues to attract new teams.
- UNIFI Team; from the University of Florence (Italy). A veteran of our competitions (first participation in 2012).
The Winners
The winners of the ERL Emergency 2018 sea + land Tournament were:
- 1st Place – UNIFI Robotics Team + MSAS
- 2nd Place – AUV Team TomKyle
Other prizes awarded were: - “Creativity Award – land team” – AUV Team TomKyle,
- “Best Rookie Award” – Team Bath Drones Marine,
- “Best Marine Team Award” – UNIFI Robotics Team,
- “Best Fair Play Award” – AUV Team TomKyle,
- “Persistency Award” – Fuerteventura BD Robotics,
- “Resilience Award” – AUV Team TomKyle.
The Judges
This year we had a large pool of judges coming from all over Europe and the U.S. We are pleased to thank AUVSI, IEEE OES, CNR-INM, Jacobs University, Polytechnic University of Le Marche, University of Padova, University of the West of England and the University of Zagreb, who provided exceptionally qualified judges, increasing the quality of the competition. Dr. Bill Kirkwood also presented a plaque in appreciation for the organisation of the competition to the local organizing committee.
Sponsors
IEEE OES played a fundamental role as the Main Sponsor. One of the ERL goals is to educate future multi-disciplinary engineers. Therefore, the sponsorship of ‘Breaking the Surface’ 2018, the 10th Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Marine Robotics and Applications, is well aligned with our mission. The organizers of ‘Breaking the Surface’ provided 2 complimentary registrations to the best rookie team and 2 to the land team that won the creativity award, allowing 4 students to participate in the 10 years edition of this multi-disciplinary and educational workshop.
We also engaged with the marine robotics commercial sector, with Blue Robotics that offered three vouchers for their online shop to the teams that won the Resilience award, the Persistency award and the Best Marine Team award. This will help these teams to improve their vehicles for the next editions.
Our aim is to continue to develop ERL Emergency as a unique event that challenges teams with realistic conditions, with an emphasis on multi-vehicle cooperation (through double and three-main competitions). These achievements were made possible thanks to the fundamental support of IEEE OES and all our other sponsors. We thank all the teams, judges, exhibitors, visitors and everyone involved, who made ERL Emergency 2018 such as a successful event.
Next year, we will have two ERL Emergency events: one dedicated to land and aerial robots and one for marine and land robots as in 2018.
Reference
[1] Matteo Franchi, Alessandro Ridolfi, Leonardo Zacchini, “A Forward-Looking Sonar-Based System for Underwater Mosaicing and Acoustic Odometry”, 2018 IEEE OES Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Symposium (AUV 2018), Porto, Portugal.
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.