Fall 2022 GRASP SFI: Herbert Tanner, University of Delaware, “Networked aerial detection of mobile radiation sources”

*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom here…

Mobile robotic sensor networks promise cutting edge technological solutions to a broad collection of real-world observation, detection, and decision-making problems, in domains ranging from environmental monitoring, to emergency response, to national security. Nuclear nonproliferation is a particular domain international implications in the latter area, framing an active sensing application problem where robots are called to rapidly detect radiological material in transit. Our approach to tackling this engineering challenge is rooted in our conviction that robot control, estimation, and decision making are all intrinsically interlinked and necessitate co-design, where measurement statistics should directly inform robot control and navigation, and estimation should leverage robot motion planning. The approach led to the development of a networked active sensing architecture for groups of aerial vehicles equipped with commercial off-the-shelf radiation sensors which can achieve an order of magnitude improvement in detection performance over alternative solutions at that time. This success also highlights the importance of model-driven measurement and measurement-informed robot deployment strategies.