Introduction

What is this Blog?

For the past year, I have been working to develop a flexible, and robust simulation system to help prove the functionality of our BRECCIA system.  This blog is designed to contain guides on how to recreate my simulations, as well as my future plans on what I hope to accomplish before the project (and my funding) ends in December 2018.  It could also prove useful for presenting my research as my final project within my Master's Program at the University of Utah.

My simulations currently exist primarily as Gazebo programs interfaced with SITL (Software in the Loop).  This allows our Quadcopter simulation to interact with a physical environment, which is something that SITL lacks when used on its own.  It is also useful as a more intuitive visualization of the quadcopter's predicted behavior.

What sets my simulations apart from other tutorials that exist online (beyond being designed to prove our BRECCIA system), is that they take place in an environment closely resembling the University of Utah campus.

University of Utah Campus in Gazebo

The goal of my simulations is to provide as realistic an environment as possible to use when testing BRECCIA's decision making abilities before using it on a real quadcopter.  Therefore, it was prudent to try and recreate the elevation of real buildings and obstacles that are normally found in an urban environment.  I was unable to find a suitable tutorial or repository that does exactly what I did, and so I believe that it is my responsibility to share this knowledge with others that might want to do the same.

I imagine that future research students under Dr. Tom Henderson will be the people that find this blog most useful, but I hope to explain my research clearly enough that any other hobbyists or researchers can replicate or modify my work.

I wish I could thank all of the sites and people that have contributed to this project, but there are way too many of them to include them all here.  So, I will attach links to useful tutorials and websites that helped me as I write my guides.

If any readers have a question, please feel free to contact me via email and I can try to help.  

The Big Picture

The purpose in creating these Gazebo simulations is to prove the concepts that make up our BRECCIA system.

BRECCIA is an intelligent GIS tool that is designed to assist users in gathering and processing information utilizing autonomous quadcopters.  It contains a database of beliefs, desires and intentions (a BDI framework) and uses it to make decisions on how best to achieve its goals.  If there is uncertainty within the database, it follows a set of plans to try and resolve them.

To read more about our project, please refer to these publications below:

``BRECCIA: A Multi-Agent Data Fusion and Decision Support System for Dynamic Mission Planning,'' David Sacharny, Thomas C. Henderson, Amar Mitiche, Robert Simmons, Taylor Welker and Xiuyi Fan, 2nd Conference on Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS 2017), Cambridge, MA, 7-9 August, 2017.

``BRECCIA: Unified Probabilistic Dynamic Geospatial Intelligence,'' David Sacharny, Thomas C. Henderson, Amar Mitiche, Robert Simmons, Taylor Welker and Xiuyi Fan, IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017 Late Breaking Paper), Vancouver, Canada, 24-28 September, 2017.

``A Probabilistic Logic for Multi-source Heterogeneous Information Fusion,'' Thomas C. Henderson, Robert Simmons, Amar Mitiche, Xuiyi Fan and David Sacharny, IEEE Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration, Daegu, South Korea, 15-18 November, 2017.

``BRECCIA: A Novel Multi-source Fusion Framework for Dynamic Geospatial Data Analysis,'' David Sacharny, Thomas C. Henderson, Robert Simmons, Amar Mitiche, Taylor Welker and Xiuyi Fan, IEEE Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration, Daegu, South Korea, 15-18 November, 2017.

``Probabilistic Logic for Intelligent Systems,'' Thomas C. Henderson, Robert Simmons, Bernard Serbinowski, Xiuyi Fan, Amar Mitiche, and Michael Cline , International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Baden-Baden, Germany, 11-15 June, 2018.

About Me

My name is Taylor Welker, and I am a Masters Student working as a Research Assistant at the University of Utah.  My advisor is Dr. Tom Henderson in the School of Computing and we are working to help develop an intelligent system for autonomous planning and control of quadcopters.

My role in the research team is to develop the infrastructure for testing this system.  Specifically, I have been over handling hardware related to the quadcopter, as well as for developing both 2D and 3D simulations that can be used to visualize the effectiveness of our methods.

My academic interests are centered around the development of intelligent systems.  Some of my favorite classes so far in my Masters Program include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Motion Planning.