Mobile Robotics & UAVs | Arul Selvam Periyasamy

I participated in two MBZIRC editions with Team NimbRo, completing various challenges that integrated UAVs, UGVs, and cross-platform collaboration.

MBZIRC 2017 In the 2017 edition, the UAV’s task was to land on a moving truck and autonomously collect moving objects from the ground. Meanwhile, the UGV had to locate a black box within the arena, approach it, and identify the side featuring hanging wrenches. From several available options, the UGV needed to select the correctly sized wrench to identify a valve, estimate its pose, and rotate it.

I developed a deep learning-based approach to locate specific wrenches and implemented a module for valve pose estimation using a short-range pmd CamBoard pico flexx depth camera; these contributions are detailed in the following article:” (Schwarz et al., 2019)

MBZIRC 2020 The 2020 edition focused on autonomous firefighting, where I contributed to both UAV and UGV development. I designed an object detection module for the UAV, optimizing it for energy-efficient execution on an on-board Google Edge TPU. For the UGV, I implemented object detection and 3D model registration using laser point clouds. These contributions are detailed in the following papers: (Lenz et al., 2020) and (Lenz et al., 2022)

UAV with on-board Edge TPU.

Object detection and registration using laser point clouds.

References

2022

Autonomous Wall-building and Firefighting: Team NimbRo’s UGV Solution for MBZIRC 2020

Christian Lenz, Jan Quenzel, Arul Selvam Periyasamy, and 7 more authors

Field Robotics, vol. 2, pp. 55-74, 2022

Bib

@article{lenz2021team,
  title = {Autonomous Wall-building and Firefighting: Team NimbRo’s UGV Solution for MBZIRC 2020},
  author = {Lenz, Christian and Quenzel, Jan and Periyasamy, Arul Selvam and Razlaw, Jan and Rochow, Andre and Splietker, Malte and Schreiber, Michael and Schwarz, Max and S{\"u}berkr{\"u}b, Finn and Behnke, Sven},
  journal = {Field Robotics, vol. 2, pp. 55-74},
  year = {2022},
}

2020

Autonomous wall building with a UGV-UAV team at MBZIRC 2020

Christian Lenz, Max Schwarz, Andre Rochow, and 4 more authors

In IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), 2020

Bib

@inproceedings{lenz2020autonomous,
  title = {Autonomous wall building with a UGV-UAV team at MBZIRC 2020},
  author = {Lenz, Christian and Schwarz, Max and Rochow, Andre and Razlaw, Jan and Periyasamy, Arul Selvam and Schreiber, Michael and Behnke, Sven},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)},
  pages = {189--196},
  year = {2020},
}

2019

Team NimbRo at MBZIRC 2017: Autonomous valve stem turning using a wrench

Max Schwarz, David Droeschel, Christian Lenz, and 7 more authors

Journal of Field Robotics (JFR), 2019

Bib

@article{schwarz2019team,
  title = {Team NimbRo at MBZIRC 2017: Autonomous valve stem turning using a wrench},
  author = {Schwarz, Max and Droeschel, David and Lenz, Christian and Periyasamy, Arul Selvam and Puang, En Yen and Razlaw, Jan and Rodriguez, Diego and Sch{\"u}ller, Sebastian and Schreiber, Michael and Behnke, Sven},
  journal = {Journal of Field Robotics (JFR)},
  volume = {36},
  number = {1},
  pages = {170--182},
  year = {2019},
  publisher = {Wiley Online Library},
}