Robotics Intern

Overview

Contributed to two R&D projects that leveraged robotics for military use cases: autonomous exploration with ground robots and semi-autonomous navigation with drones. These projects aim to reduce soldier risk in operational environments by using robots to perform activities.

Key Contributions

Autonomous ground exploration

• Decomposed the mission into 3 core stages: localisation, approach, and exploration.
• Localisation: Integrated GPS-based positioning in ROS using an onboard GPS module to determine the robot’s starting location with respect to exploration area.
• Approach: Developed autonomous path-planning logic to guide the robot into the exploration area.
• Automated the logic and transitions between the 3 stages.

Semi-autonomous drone navigation

• Designed the user experience and defined system architecture for the mission.
• Trained a custom object tracking model on urban environments.
• Integrated the objected trackig model on a test drone.

Outcomes

Autonomous ground exploration

• The robot is capable of autonomous operation from any given starting point, using GPS to initialise localisation, entering the designated exploration area, and conducting an exploration sequence with no human intervention.

Semi-autonomous drone navigation

• Enabled a hybrid mode where drones are manually piloted to within ~50m of a target, after which the system takes over to complete the journey autonomously. This significantly lowers the skill barrier for soldiers operating drones in cramped urban environments.