Photo By Master Sgt. Brad Staggs | Members of the Air Force Research Lab prepare two Martin UAV Bat-4 aircraft for flight...... read more read more
MUSCATATUCK URBAN TRAINING CENTER, Ind. – A small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, circles overhead at over 2,000 feet, looking for survivors following a natural disaster. That aircraft spots something moving and cues a lower flying multi-rotor aircraft, much like a camera drone you can buy online, to get in for a closer view. After confirming that the movement is or could be a human being, the hovering aircraft cues a ground robot that can get under rubble and in places that the flying robots can’t to find the victim and let human rescuers know exactly where to go. All of this is done with no human needing to tell the robots what to do.
Sound like the future? At Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in southern Indiana, the Air Force, Army, and Naval Research Labs have come together for a joint experimentation exercise with the Autonomy for Adaptive Collaborative Sensing (AACS) Program.
“Autonomy is simply allowing a piece of equipment to react to its environment without needing human intervention,” explained Todd Jenkins, the Small Unmanned Systems Exploitation (SUSEX) program manager and a member of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Sensors Directorate. “Different platforms from different disciplines should be able to communicate and work together seamlessly to assist human operators during their missions, whether it be a rescue mission or searching for a single person.”
The lofty goal, according to Jenkins, is to have a single operator controlling all of the air and ground robotics platforms at once while crucial information is fed back to the operator to parse. For the engineers, such as Tom Apker, an Autonomy Engineer with the Naval Research Laboratory, this brings on a whole new set of challenges.
“I think in terms of geospatial problems or questions that a commander in a disaster scenario might have about what’s going on in his environment,” Apker says. “The major challenge for this particular exercise is that we’re trying to do geospatial reasoning tasks for both fixed wing air assets ... while also working with ground robots and, eventually, multi-rotor vehicles.”
This means that Apker and his team have to figure out where a fixed-wing asset, such as a small UAV, has to be several minutes to hours ahead of getting them there while a slow-moving multi-rotor vehicle with a camera or a ground robot can be updated minute by minute ... and all of this must happen while everything bad is happening around them.
All of these assets are owned by the different military agencies and this is the first time that they have all been brought together for a single exercise, creating a hodge-podge of technologies, coding languages, and even differing service languages in one synchronized event.
“That has been the big focus of my work this week,” Apker continues. “Figuring out just what those interfaces have to be to support a common operating picture that allows air-to-ground and ground-to-air task cueing so that the ground vehicles can detect things where the air vehicle can’t and the air vehicle can pick up targets and follow them where the ground vehicles can’t go.”
When these systems are used in a laboratory environment, results can be tweaked on the spot and engineers can make assumptions about what will happen to their robots.
However, once they get to a field environment, a whole new level of assumptions are raised and engineers may find out that what they thought worked very well will not work in a real environment. For Research Scientist Jonathan Fink and the Army Research Lab, this is a welcome change for their ground robots.
“We’re always interested in getting our systems into new environments,” Fink said while watching two ground robots go through their testing phase just outside the window. “We’re looking at how we can use multiple ground robots to autonomously collect imagery, signal strength data from radio beacons, things like this, in a complicated post-disaster environment and this exercise presents new challenges.”
The technology only represents a fraction of what this testing and evaluation exercise will accomplish. The other end of the testing revolves around what this technology can be used for and Raj Maholtra, program manager of AACS, believes that this is a technology that can be used for the benefit of mankind.
“This is a really positive story about how robots can collaborate to help survivors in disasters,” Maholtra says. “We think that with these assets in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, we’ll be able to give situational awareness to the forward air controllers and the folks responding to the disaster, including the NGOs [non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross] and the non-military people.”
Maholtra says that earlier situational awareness can translate to saved lives and that this kind of autonomous system can detect the secondary incidents which occur after a disaster such as chemical and biological spills. Following the initial disaster response, they can be used to monitor the situation or perform follow-on missions where it might be hazardous for humans to go.
The general consensus among the scientists and engineers is that we are about a decade away from having an autonomous system between the air and ground assets. They all agree that there are many hurdles to get over before it is ready and a lot more research, testing and evaluation needs to be done, but bringing the three service labs together for the first time allowed for a jump in progress. The next step is simply more testing and Muscatatuck provides the disaster scenario for exactly what is needed.
“I call Muscatatuck the Disney World for first responders and disaster relief,” Jenkins concluded. “There was a lot of appeal for all three teams to come here knowing what an exciting urban environment this would be. We had imagined that a hurricane had come through, a tornado, or an earthquake, of sorts, and that we would have our system helping in that type of scenario. This was just ideal for that.”
| Date Taken: | 10.01.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 10.01.2015 14:32 |
| Story ID: | 177761 |
| Location: | BUTLERVILLE, IN, US |
| Web Views: | 374 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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