Recent work in mobile robots has generated a novel type of heterogeneous agent team: marsupial robots. The term marsupial robot connotes a larger "mother" robot carrying one or more smaller "baby" robots much as a kangaroo mother carries her young. Following the biological analogy, the mother robot can provide power ("food") or help (rescue the baby, communicate suggestions or warnings). Marsupial teams can consist of any combination of aerial, ground, or underwater vehicles. A marsupial team of ground robots is well-suited for domains such as urban search and rescue (USAR) and related endeavors (characterizing NBC contamination, planetary exploration, etc.). The mother robot can carry and protect expensive/vulnerable specialized robots such as a "snake" or micro-rover. For example, the typical entry into a collapsed building after a hurricane is through the roof. The mother can be lowered down, then navigate to a likely location and place the daughter robot in the target search area. As another example, during a NBC incident a mother robot can be built to traverse quickly through the stand-off area and deploy the daughters in the hot zone faster than the daughters could travel alone and without risk to humans. The basic research issues unique to marsupials are: when to get out (deployment), how to get in (docking), and how the mother should interact with the daughters (roles). Progress in autonomous docking has been reported in other publications, see [2] for details. This paper concentrates on heuristics for automating deployment and on the roles of the mother, daughter, and human operator. Three of the four roles of the mother (Coach, Manager, and Messenger) may require the mother to visually track the daughters. This paper reports on visual tracking of daughters using the Spherical Coordinate Transform (SCT) space. The human operator's role as a Mission Controller appears to be enhanced by using the marsupial team for collaborative teleoperation.
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