System Design for Robot Agent Team

摘要

Small air and ground physical agents (robots) will be ubiquitous on the battlefield of the 21st century, principally to lower the exposure to harm of our ground forces in urban and open terrain. Teams of small collaborating physical agents conducting tasks such as Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RSTA), intelligence, chemical and biological agent detection, logistics, decoy, sentry, and communications relay will have advanced sensors, communications, and mobility characteristics. The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is conducting research in sensor fusion, communications, and processing on small mobile robotic platforms principally in the urban environment in support of Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT). This paper discusses on-going research at ARL that supports the development of multi-robot collaboration. Commercial ATRV-2 and Urban Robot platforms are being utilized along with advanced battlefield visualization tools and other tools to effectively command and control teams of collaborating physical agents and present the gathered information in a manner that is useful to the commander. The software architecture and the modular packaging designs will be the focus of the paper, which also consider mother ship concepts. Additionally, work that has been conducted with PM Soldier Systems to integrate robotic platforms (Robot Warrior) with the Land Warrior (LW) ensemble to create a Scout Warrior will be discussed.