COPS

NASA's Team Costar is taking part in DARPA Subterranean Challenge which aims to develop tecniques to enable missions in subterranean environments. Such environments are typically large and suffer from severe communication constraints. We investigated multi-agent collaboration behaviors to efficiently explore frontiers while maintaining high situational awareness with a static base station. This research resulted in COPS, a connectivity planner for communication-constrained networks. We posed a novel connectivity constraint that allow agents to execute objectives to a higher degree than previous work while still ensuring situational awareness over time. We also developed a clustering method that allow us to split the optimization problem into multiple smaller subproblems which increases the scalability drastically. The methods are throughly described in the paper Intermittent Connectivity for Exploration in Communication-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems.

The video illustrates exploration of a network. The state colors indicates clusters.

The research was conducted at California Institute of Technology and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.