On October 24th, 2019 the Triton UAS Team met with the San Diego-based company, Brain Corp at their headquarters. Brain Corp is involved in the development of autonomous vehicle systems and software, and has also worked with other fellow student-run teams such as UCSD RoboSub and San Diego City College RoboSub. While our team got to meet peers from other student-run teams, Triton UAS also had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Brain Corp’s VP of New Product Development, John Black.
John Black provided the teams with a presentation that explained in further detail what Brain Corp’s mission was and how they developed a commercial operating system for production, deployment and support of autonomous mobile robots. The teams were also given an overview of how one of Brain Corp’s autonomous floor scrubbers is operated. The floor scrubber is first driven by a worker on a route that they would like the scrubber to follow. After doing so, the scrubber is able to autonomously optimize and drive the same route while also actively avoiding any obstacles that may be on the floor, such as boxes or shoppers in real-time.
After Brain Corp’s presentation and demo, Triton UAS, as well as UCSD RoboSub and San Diego City College RoboSub, were given the opportunity to individually provide a presentation and a Q&A session to Brain Corp about our teams. After listening to both RoboSub teams’ presentations, we learned that the RoboSub teams participate in a very similar competition that our team competes in. The RoboSub competition is hosted by RoboNation, which was originally part of the AUVSI Foundation, the same organization that hosts the AUVSI SUAS (Student Unmanned Aerial Systems) competition we compete in. The RoboSub competition similar to SUAS places a heavy emphasis on autonomy and includes competition tasks such as path planning. As a result of the parallels in the two competitions, the RoboSub teams that presented at Brain Corp have an almost identical electronic payload as our airframe, with the key exception of sensors because the RoboSub competition is underwater).
Brain Corp followed the teams’ presentations with a live demonstration of their autonomous industrial floor scrubber.
Brain Corp engineers then provided the teams with a Q&A session after the demo, where we learned several key aspects of the Brain Corp’s robots mirror our competition tasks. For example, both the large and small robot pictured above need to be able to avoid static obstacles, such as boxes in the middle of a grocery aisle, as well as dynamic obstacles, such as workers and shoppers. The SUAS competition this year incorporates both static and dynamic obstacles into the competition tasks. In addition, the cleaning route the robot is taught to follow is analogous to the waypoints the airframe is required to plan a path through and fly. Overall, the path planning and computer vision work done by the Triton UAS team parallels the challenges that the Brain Corp robot faces and our team could learn a lot from the engineers at Brain Corp.
We at Triton UAS would like to extend a big thank you to Brain Corp and their employees for their time and support. We would also like to especially thank John Black and Brittany Bridges for arranging this opportunity to present and learn about Brain Corp. As we continue to progress on this year’s journey, we are very grateful to have Brain Corp as one of our generous sponsors.