Lighter-Than-Air Autonomous Agents: A Hands-On Tutorial

Organizers: Donald Sofge, Sridhar Ravi, and Fumin Zhang

Advisory Committee: Daniel Lofaro, and Hoa Nguyen

Date: June 7, 2022

Location: Atlanta, GA

Pre-registration: acc2022.a2c2.org/registration/

Call for papers: https://www.gtsr.gatech.edu/2022/04/20/call-for-papers-acc-2022/

Lighter-Than-Air Autonomous Agents: A Hands-On Tutorial Workshop aims to give participants a hands-on experience with using lighter-than-air autonomous agents (LTA3) and to discuss the recent advances and trends of these platforms

Lighter-Than-Air platforms have the potential to greatly improve swarming and human-robot-interaction research in both academic and industrial settings. While these platforms are considerably slower when compared to other miniature aerial vehicles (e.g., fixed wing aircraft, rotorcraft), these platforms can loiter for long time intervals and are extremely safe to fly due to their soft helium envelopes.

During the workshop, participants will have access to physical LTA3 agents in which they will be able to program agents to solve a predefined task. Accompanied with this tutorial will be keynote lectures by government and industry leaders in the LTA3 field in order to encourage discussion. The tutorial will conclude with a live demonstration of a swarm of these LTA3 agents performing the given task as implemented by the participants. Top tutorial participants will also be given one of the LTA3 agents on extended loan to allow them to perform LTA3 research at their home institutions. These participants will be encouraged to participate in our future follow up workshops on the same topic at ICRA 2023.