Supervisory Control for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

This project will produce an upgrade “kit” for mobile robots with robotic arms. The kit provides supervisory control and/or augmented teleoperation to deploy IED detection sensors for vehicle inspection with minimal workload burden, thus allowing the operator to concentrate on visual inspection and assessment of sensor data. The kit consists of spatial awareness sensors, perception processing, motion behaviors, and operator interface. Spatial awareness sensors and processing provide distance and surface orientation measurements for the robotic motion behaviors and the operator interface. The supervisory control interface enables the operator to designate goals for semi-autonomous robot motion and/or IED detector deployment behaviors. The augmented teleoperation interface provides operator with enhanced spatial perception (distance and surface orientation cues), shared control options (the operator controls some degrees of freedom while the robot automatically maintains a spatial relationship to the target), and robot position control. Phase II builds on Phase I core technologies to track designated interest points even when temporarily obscured by the IED detector or other parts of the robot, to estimate surface orientation of the at the interest point, to generate visual-servoing speed control commands for precision position control, and to generate steering commands for an approach orthogonal to the inspection surface.