A drone testbed for adaptive planning exploration
Ricardo Sanz and Julia Bermejo
UPM Autonomous Systems Laboratory and Center for Automation and Robotics.
Proposal for a final grade research project
The Robot Control Testbed (RCT) is a collection of research plat-
forms that are developed inside the the ASLab ASys project. This
document summarily describes ASys and the RCT as a framework for
performing final grade projects like PFC, TFM or TFG. An specific
project proposal is also described: the development of a testbed for
the development and evaluation of adaptive planning algorithms to be
used in the augmentation of autonomy in teams of drones an mobile
robots.
Keywords | autonomy | robotics | UAV | UGV | planning
T his document summarily describes the Robot Control
testbed (RCT) research platform that serves as a frame-
work for general research on autonomous systems and specif-
ically as a background of final grade, student-sized projects.
This is part of the development of robotic platforms for the
testing of the artificial intelligence and control system develop-
ments in the Autonomous Systems (ASys) long term project.
This document also describes a specific project for a TFM1
that addresses the construction of a simulation environment to
investigate the use of high-level planning in the cognitive con-
trollers for a team of robots a drone and a ground vehicle
collaborating in a single mission.
If you are interested in doing your PFC/TFG/TFM in
ASLab, please read this document and feel free to ask any
question to the ASLab coordinator (ricardo.sanz@upm.es).
If you have special, new, challenging, personal ideas of what
to do in this context, feel also free to suggest them as research
possibilities for your project.
Please have in mind that ASLab is a research group that
tries to build novel and sophisticated systems; and this some-
times requieres a wide and heterogeneous spectrum of knowl-
edge and ability to deal with the unknown that usually re-
quieres some audacity, courage and boldness from the student.
Sometimes this may requiere the study of several technologies
that may matter to a specific project and enter into domains
somewhat far form the mainstream engineering discipline.
Engineering Autonomy: the ASys Project
In ASLab we do research on autonomous systems. You
can find more information in our always obsolete website
www.aslab.org.
Autonomous systems are systems that depend solely
on themselves to be capable of sustained provision of a par-
ticular service even in the presence of major uncertainties in
the service demand, the context of service execution and the
disturbances that the system may be suffering from the out-
side or even the inside.
The Autonomous Systems Project
(ASys) of the UPM Autonomous Sys-
tem Laboratory (ASLab) tries to de- ASys
velop universal control technology for
autonomy.
www.aslab.org/documents/controlled/A-2015-003.pdf
Our autonomy technology evolves from early attempts to
apply artificial intelligence to control systems (Sanz, 1990),
using recent theoretical achievements in the conceptualisation
the domain of perception (L opez, 2007), developments that
formalise them into usable software assets, such as an ontology
for the engineering of autonomous systems (Bermejo-Alonso,
2010) or mechanisms for deep self-awareness based on func-
tional models to the systems themselves (Hern andez et al.,
| testbed
2015).
ASys Project Vision. The ASys project intends the creation of
science and technology for universal autonomy. In this con-
text, universal means that the technology shall be effective
in augmenting the level of autonomy of any kind of artefact
in any kind of mission (Sanz et al., 2000). This implies a
wide range of (autonomous) systems to be considered in the
research, from robots to industrial process plants or comput-
ing systems placed in the cyberspace. Additionally, the ASys
science may serve as a systems-centric substrate for theories
of natural autonomy that can explain how the human mind
works (Collier, 2002).
Tools from the AI field have been extensively explored
for intelligent control in the past few decades, improving the
adaptivity and efficiency of systems. However, as it has been
pointed out, each one of them is usually efficacious only for a
restricted type of problems. Besides, a not negligible amount
of tuning is always requiered for their application to any spe-
cific system. This means that: i) an important part of the
adaptivity is still determined at the design stage, and ii) the
achieved solution is only partially reusable for other systems,
and hardly transferable to other domains.
The underlying ideas of the ASys approach are: i) to
overcome the previous issues by moving the responsibility for
adaptation from design time to systems run-time i.e. mak-
ing the system responsible of its own adaptation, and ii)
provide the solution in an architectural form, rather than an
algorithmic one, so as to meet the non-functional requirements
that appear in these systems.
Model-based Autonomy. The strategy proposed to address
adaptation at run-time is that of exploiting cognitive self-
control loops, which are control loops based on knowledge.
This knowledge is realised in the form of different models: of
the system, of the environment, and of its mission. This is
what we call the model-based view of cognition.
The pervasive model-based approach in ASys is two-
folded: i) an ASys system will be built using models of it
and ii) an ASys system will also exploit models of itself to
drive its operation or behaviour. Model-based engineering and
model-based behaviour then merge into a single driving con-
cept: model-based autonomy. The main goal: the models
About ASLab
The Autonomous Systems Laboratory is a research group focused on the generation of science and
technology for robust autonomy. This is a technical property of systems that make them capable of
sustained provision of a particular service even in the presence of major uncertainties in the service
demand, the context of service execution and the disturbances that the system may be suffering
from outside or inside. Find us at www.aslab.org.
1
Trabajo Fin de Master
ASLAB May 5, 2017 A-003 v01 17
the system will use to control its behaviour will eventually be In addition, architecture-based development offers the fol-
those very same models used by engineers to build it. lowing advantages:
Models thus constitute the core for our autonomous sys- Systems can be built in a rapid, cost-effective manner
tems research programme. Unified functional and structural
by importing (or generating) externally developed compo-
views are considered critical for our research as they provide
nents.
knowledge about both the intended and the expectable be- It is possible to predict global qualities of the final system
haviours of the system.
by analysing the architecture.
The obtained models will be exploited by means of com- The development of product lines sharing the same archi-
mercial application engines or customised model execution
tectural design is easier and cheaper.
modules. Models will be exercised during runtime to derive Restrictions on design variability make the design process
the most suitable actions to do. Models are the knowledge
more productive and less prone to faults.
that the autonomous agent will use to act properly.
ASys is thus interested in domain variations of architec-
tural designs and the engineering methodologies for their ap-
ASys-Vision-04 plication to different autonomous systems. A reference archi-
tecture is an architecture where the structures and respective
Requirements
elements and relations provide templates to derive concrete
Views architectures in a particular domain or in a family of soft-
ICe ICe ware systems, and can be expressed in a reference architecture
Design Specification model.
The ASys approach is strongly conceptual and architecture-
centric. The suitability of extant control and cognitive control
Asset Base Model architectures and how they match the ASys research ideas
and developed products (ontologies, models, views, engines)
Domain shall be determined and possible adaptations and extensions
Domain Metamodel
Ontology
Domain
Ontology shall also be considered. The definition and the consolida-
Ontology ICe
Documentation tion of architectural patterns that capture ways of organising
OAsys components in functional subsystems is critical. As a gen-
Ontology eralisation strategy, the different elements considered in the
ICe ASys research programme will be assessed in different testbed
Documentation
Pattern
Synthesis systems: mobile robots, chemical reactors, web servers, etc.
Pattern
Pattern
An integrated approach to engineering autonomy. The strat-
ICe
egy to follow to materialise the ASys vision is the construc-
Component Autonomous Deployment tion of a systems engineering framework (Johnson, 1997) that
Component System can support the engineering processes associated with the
Component construction of autonomous systems. Figure 1 summarily
Engine Model Engine depicts the entities, tooling and activities involved in this
process. It integrates the previously discussed ideas: an
Metamodel
ICe architecture-centric design approach, a methodology to en-
ICe
Asset
Operation
gineer autonomous systems based on models, and an asset
Management base of modular elements to fill in the roles specified in the
architectural patterns.
The engineering process covers from the initial capture of
application requirements and domain knowledge, to the imple-
mentation of the final product i.e. the autonomous system
Figure 1 Tasks and products in the overall ASys vision (adapted itself.
from (Sanz et al., 2008)). ICe stands for Integrated Control En- The ASys vision suggests that the self-x competences
vironment, a future development framework supporting all these (Sanz et al., 2005) that are necessary to increase system auton-
processes. omy and resilience, can be based on run-time models derived
from the models used in the engineering of the system. As de-
picted in figure 1, the autonomous system engineering Model
The ASys Architectural Approach. Focusing on the systems is transformed, by synthesis, in 1) the Autonomous System
architecture is focusing on the structural properties that con- and 2) the run-time Model of itself that it uses during its
stitute the more pervasive and stable properties of the system operation.
(Shaw and Garlan, 1996). Architectural aspects are what crit- The central part of figure 1 shows this process where the
ically determine the final capabilities of any information pro- Model is used to synthesise the Autonomous System. The In-
cessing technology, such as control systems. tegrated Control Environment (ICe) toolset shall be used to
ASys seek for an architectural solution derives from its exploit an asset base to sustain this engineering process. The
intention to address all the domain of autonomy, and there- asset base contains:
fore for the developed technology to be of general applicabil-
ity, so it be usable to develop control systems for any plant, ASys Ontology: An ontology of the domain of general au-
e.g. continuous process plants, air-traffic control or mobile tonomous systems. This serves as the core ontological sub-
robots; and to meet the critical demands for dependability strate for all ASys elements.
and survivability, because they critically depend on the sys- Domain Ontologies: Domain ontologies focused in the dif-
tems architecture. ferent application domains of ASys. The two domains that
are the current focus of the work are process control sys-
tems and mobile robotics.

2 www.aslab.org/documents/controlled/A-2015-003.pdf R. Sanz / J. Bermejo

Design Patterns: Reusable functional designs of subsys-
tems of the autonomous agent.
Components: Reusable software implementations that can
be used to play the roles specified by the patterns.
The ICe tool shall support several activities:
Specification: The specification of the ASys concerns the
intended use and autonomy properties for the agent.
Design: The design specifies the architectural organization
of the agent using the ASys pattern language as design
vocabulary.
Synthesis: The synthesis produces both the agent implemen-
tation obtaining components for the pattern roles and
the run-time model by means of model transformation
methods.
Documentation: The capture of all reference material that
may remain somewhat hidden due to the automated nature
of some of the processes.
Deployment: Deployment of the ASys and run-time models
in real operational conditions.
Operation: Operation of the ASys through an RCP-based
user interface.
Asset Management: Management of the asset base includ-
ing incorporation of new assets specifically developed for
concrete applications.
The Robot Control Testbed
ASys technology tries to be universal, i.e. of applicability to
different applications in different domains. The Robot Control
Testbed (RCT) is a collection of mobile robot systems that are
used to test the technologies that we develop. In parallel, the
Process Control Testbed (PCT) is a continuous process control
system that we use to test the applicability of the technology
in the domain of industrial chemical processes. Al the project
proposal described here are related to the RCT.
The main robot robot that we have use for the PCT is
a well known Pioneer 2AT8 robot. We call it Higgs. Smaller
robots are Keeper III robots that are common in mobile robot
research.
Figure 2 The Higgs Pioneer 2AT robot.
Figure 2.2: Pioneer 2-AT8 (Higgs) with onboard systems
R. Sanz / J. Bermejo
The Higgs Robot. The Higgs robot is a Pioneer 2AT-8 mo-
bile robot made by ActivMedia Robotics (see Figure 2). It is
a skid-steering vehicle with lightweight aluminium body and
four pneumatic wheels propelled by four reversible DC mo-
tors, equipped with high-resolution optical encoders for pre-
cise position and speed sensing and advanced dead-reckoning.
Electronic devices aboard are controlled by a Hitachi H8S
microcontroller. Additional computing boards provide extra
computing capabilities for open implementation of on-board
software.
The Pioneer 2AT robot has also other equipment that is
used for different technology evaluation missions:
Two sonar arrays, each with eight transducers that pro-
vide object detection and range information for collision
avoidance.
Two frontal and rear bumpers.
An stereo camera sometimes replaced by a monocular
camera to explore alternative designs.
A laser rangefinder.
A GPS positioning system.
A compass and accelerometers.
Wireless communications.
With this robot we explore to what extent our autonomy
software improves the performance of the robot in the execu-
tion of its missions. In particular we explore to what extent,
making Higgs self-aware can improve the robustness and re-
silience of the robot (Sanz et al., 2007; Hern
andez, 2013).
The Khepera Robot. The Khepera III robot (see Figure 3)
is a product of K-Team that is based on long-term exper-
tise in miniature robotics. It is a simple and small research
platform that offers many features available in bigger robots
like Higgs. It contains a quite powerful embedded com-
puting, multiple sensor arrays for both long range and short
range object detection ultrasound and infrared and good
differential drive odometry.
Figure 3 The Khepera III robot.
Cognitive Control in the PCT
The focus of this PFC is the construction of a testbed for
the experimentation with planning algorithms for UAVs and
UGVs.
As the focus of the proposed TFM is the synthesis of a
testbed for planning evaluation, the exact nature of the low
level controllers for the robots is not important as far as it
provides the necessary elements for the evaluation of plan-
ning algorithms using todays systems engineering processes.
In this work we will use the Aerostack framework for the con-
trol of the drone.
ASLab May 5, 2017 A-003 v01 3
Thissystemarchitectureprovidessystemdesignerstheinitialarchitecturefordevelopingtheirownfully
autonomousintelligentaerialmultirobotsystems.Thevalidationoftheproposedsystemarchitectureisa
complex task since the performance of the complete system is highly dependent on the mission, the
environment, the hardware setup, the employed algorithms, and their software implementation. Three
kindsofscenariosweresuccessfullyusedtoprovideaglobalevaluationofthecompletesystem,validating
theperformanceoftheproposedsystemarchitecture:(1)internationalaerialroboticscompetitions,(2)
selfproposedchallenges,and(3)publicdemonstrations.

Inaddition,thisthesispresentsseveralalgorithms,withdifferentlevelofdetail,thatyieldtoanincreased
levelofautonomyoftheaerialroboticsystems,developedinthecontextofparticularapplications.These
Figure 4 An overview of the Aerostack drone control system.
algorithmscanbegatheredinthefollowingfivegroups:(1)perception,(2)control,(3)planningandtask
execution, (4) intelligence and cognition, and (5) communication and interaction. All these components
have been evaluated isolatedly, demonstrating their individual performance. Nevertheless, their
The MBSE strategy to be explored is a key technological in-
The navigation system for Higgs used ROS navigation novation in todays systems engineering processes (see 5).
stacks developed by Marder-Epstein2 . This package gives us
a number of components to navigate to a desired position,
knowing an occupancy map of the environment and the ini-
tial position of the robot relative to this map. It uses odomet-
ric information and information about the obstacles got from Agent Transformation
Agent
Model Self-Model
different sensors including a laser rangefinder and a kinect
Transformation
Agent Agent
sensor. Read for example the PFC by Alberto Gonz alez that Realization Runtime
THE GAP

addressed the different issues in the Higgs testbed Gonz alez Environment
Agent
Transformation World-
Model
Model
(2013).
Instead of using this ROS implementation we plan to use Building
Assets
SOAR as a core element for robot control Laird et al. (1987, Operational
Requirements
Operational
1991). However, the robot control aspects of using SOAR are Environment
not the central content of this project. Its main content is Model Generation System

how to model the SOAR robot controller using SysML and Engineering Operation
how to synthesise the controller from this model.
In summary, the objective of this PFC is the synthesis of a
knowledge-based controller for mobile robots using a model- Figure 5 The Engineering/Runtime gap.
based systems engineering process. The knowledge and the
controller are designed and expressed as a model that is then
transformed into a run-time controller for a Khepera robot. The purpose of this project is to develop a cognitive vari-
ant of the navigation system for the PCT. We focus on SOAR
due to its technological capabilities and matureness, but it is
not the only possibility. Two alternatives to evaluate are i)
the use of ACT-R Anderson et al. (2004) and ii) the use of a
new simple ad-hoc architecture.
Molina et al. (2016)

2
http://wiki.ros.org/navigation

4 www.aslab.org/documents/controlled/A-2015-003.pdf R. Sanz / J. Bermejo

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