With a little help from our friends...
The DARPA challenge employs a long standing tradition of bringing diverse groups together, both as team mates and competitors. Our team mates at Oregon State University have been working alongside of us to enable our multiple robots to work together as a cohesive team. They are doing this by developing several key software components, and we are so thankful for them for that.
The human components of OSU are: Geoff Hollinger, Graeme Best, Bob DeBortoli, and Manish Saroya. They are extremely excited to be our partners in crime for this challenge.
Geoff is an assistant professor at the Robotic Decision Making Lab at OSU, where he advises Graeme, a Post Doc, Bob, PhD student, and Manish, an MS.
Graeme earned his PhD from the University of Sydney and focuses planning methods for multi-robot systems. He is looking forward to deploying his work for the large-scale experiments in the DARPA challenge.
Bob's work focuses on building 3D reconstructions of underwater environments using sonar, for the DARPA challenge he'll lend his expertise in degrade sensing to our team.
Manish is working on information based decision making and robot learning. He will help develop the artifact prediction problems for exploratory guidance in subterranean environments.
In their free time, they all enjoy fine wines and cheeses as well as long walks on the beach at sunset, after all, we did say they were our better halves.
OSU taught us love, next week CMU will teach us patience, but this challenge will teach us all some pain!
