Researchers at JPL are developing groups of multiple autonomous robot swarms to explore planets beyond earth. The robots in these systems autonomously share information and collaborate towards a common goal, such as a distributed exploration of lunar terrain. 

While these systems are designed for autonomous activity, they need human supervision. Our collaborators in the JPL Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy Group are developing MOSAIC, a tool for humans to schedule and control such systems.

In our collaboration, we created an intuitive, visual and interactive tool for engineers to watch the autonomous activity across a network of robots at a glance.

Our tool enables human operators to cross-compare and analyze robot energy level, performance and efficiency, and synthesize this and other information to understand the state of the system.

Recognition and Follow-on Funding

PUBLICATION: Suyun Bae, Federico Rossi, Joshua Vander Hook, Scott Davidoff and Kwan-Liu Ma (2020). A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems’ Worldviews. IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Salt Lake City, Utah, 2020.

$30K to support further development with Sandra Bae