SVan: Synchronous Team-Robot Van
Supervisor: | Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sami Haddadin |
Researchers: | M.Sc. Alexander Moortgat-Pick (project lead) M.Sc. Anna Adamczyk Dr.-Ing. Daniel-Andre Dücker |
Duration: | 2 Years (01.2021 - 09.2023) |
Funded by: | Dobeneck Technologie Stiftung |
Mobile robotics hub to protect and monitor our environment
Environmental protection is a huge task that often exceeds the capacities of us humans. With environmental robotics and the SVan project, we want to create a solution by multiplying humanity's capabilities through robots.
What was essential was the development of a democratized telepresence, our Collaborative Robot Interface for Telepresence (Co-RIFT), which enables everyone to easily use robots remotely from any location.
The SVan prototype is a mobile hub for the deployment of a heterogeneous robot team on air, land and water. It includes both Co-RIFT and the necessary infrastructure such as mobile internet connection, WiFi mesh, energy and edge computing power. The latter is ideal for enabling artificial intelligence directly on SVan and thus expanding the capabilities of the robots. One example is AI-based garbage detection from the air, which enables a land robot to collect detected garbage.
SVan allows numerous people to access the multi-domain robot team remotely at the same time, even while the robots are operating autonomously or semi-autonomously.
While SVan is not the solution to all environmental problems, the prototype shows a planetary-scale scalable concept of how robots can be used to address today's challenges.