Stingray II: Control of High Speed Unmanned Vehicles

For the Stingray Project, iRobot Corporation and Chatten Associates will develop techniques for teleoperation of small, high-speed UGVs. Currently deployed small UGVs are limited in the missions that they can perform, due to their slow speed and the limited situational awareness that they provide to their operators. We will address these limitations by combining semi-autonomous driver-assist behaviors with immersive telepresence. We will use the iRobot Warrior platform for the Stingray UGV, and we will modify this platform to travel at speeds up to 20 mph by replacing the treads with wheels and modifying the gearing for higher speeds. Driver-assist behaviors such as autonomous perimeter following, street following, and heading control will enable the operator to control small UGVs at much higher speeds than is currently feasible. The Chatten Head Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV) provides greatly increased situational awareness compared to fixed or joystick-aimed cameras, and we will extend these capabilities with panoramic and rear-view cameras. The combination of driver assist behaviors and immersive teleoperation will allow the Stingray UGV to perform reconnaissance and IED search missions at high speeds, with the vehicle under autonomous control, while the operator is free to focus full attention on the reconnaissance task.