For robotics systems to be used in high risk, real-world situations, they have to be quickly deployable and robust to environmental changes, under-performing hardware, and mission subtask failures. Robots are often designed to consider a single sequence of mission events, with complex algorithms lowering individual subtask failure rates under some critical constraints. Our approach is to leverage common techniques in vision and control and encode robustness into mission structure through outcome monitoring and recovery strategies, aided by a system infrastructure that allows for quick mission deployments under tight time constraints and no central communication. We also detail lessons in rapid field robotics development and testing. Systems were developed and evaluated through real-robot experiments at an outdoor test site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, as well as in the 2020 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge. All competition trials were completed in fully autonomous mode without RTK-GPS. Our system led to 4th place in Challenge 2 and 7th place in the Grand Challenge, and achievements like popping five balloons (Challenge 1), successfully picking and placing a block (Challenge 2), and dispensing the most water autonomously with a UAV of all teams onto an outdoor, real fire (Challenge 3).
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