Project MiniCREW Kick-Off

Creating a demo from scratch to demonstrate the concepts of Predictive Health and Capability awareness.

We’re going to break cars. Some virtual, some real.

The first documented project here on the SoL tech group is called miniCREW. Mostly, we’re doing this to have fun. Hopefully, we will also create a mix between a fun mixed-reality game and hardware demonstrator to explain what my company does. The idea is to place several real drones in a small “arena”. As a group, we assign a job, such as mapping the space or moving materials. This job is broken into tasks for each drone, based on it’s capabilites and health. The fun part comes in when we create real faults, such as broken wheels, overheated engines and shredded tires. It is then our job to update the task assignments and plan maintaince, if possible.

Expected Components

  • The Work Site
    • It must be pretty small, as we want to take this to trade shows. ~1x1 M, hopefully multi-level
    • A series of sensors, such as cameras, for tracking objects.
      • Start with a Computer Vision based tracker as a cheap way of tracking all of the cars, without needing an Inertial Monitoring Unit in each one
  • 3/4 Cars, already selected Sniclo Y60 with FPV Camera
    • Each running a Capability-Aware Prognostics System (CAPS) instance
    • Autopilot via PX4 firmware
    • Initial sensor package: single FPV camera
    • A means of controlling the RC cars directly from a computer
  • A single Flexible-Opoerations REsource MANAger (FOREMAN) instance
  • A Digital Twin showing the current state of the worksite This is me holding up a tracked cube

Applications

  • Capability-Aware Prognostics System (CAPS)
    • This is the application that knows how healthy and capable a given vehicle is
  • Flexible-Opoerations REsource MANAger (FOREMAN)
    • This is the application that used the CAPS data, along with the current job to decide who can do what today without breaking
  • Central
    • This is authority assigning jobs to the CREW (1 FOREMAN + 3/4 CAPS)
  • Autopilot and logic to translate high level commands sent from the FOREMAN into tasks for each platform.
  • A visualization tool and game in an existing engine (likely Godot/Redot) to reflect the current state of the Work Site.
    • Could possibly be used to create a fully virtual instance
  • Computer vision based tracker for the Work Site

A Sneak Peak

  • Current state of that visualization tool/game we’ve put together Work Site Main View
  • An OpenCV based approch to tracking these cars on the cheap Just a Cube