TOOLBOX

BROWSE TOPICS

RESOURCES

ABOUT THIS SITE

Fair Use Notice
© AAAI 2000-2008

pmwiki.org
pmwiki-2.2.0-beta65

edit SideBar

Autonomous Vehicles, Robots, Rovers, Explorers & more

(a subtopic of Robots)

"I don’t think cars will become autonomous instantly," [Michael] Montemerlo said, pointing to "smart" anti-lock brakes that are already in cars. "You should think of that car as being just a tiny bit autonomous. Cars are going to have more and more of these adaptive systems and one day you’ll wake up, and you’ll have a car that’s able to drive itself."
- from Robot car to tackle city streets

drivers prohibited    

Introductory Readings

ELROB 2006: 1st European Land-Robot Trial, 2006 15th - 18th of May 2006 in Hammelburg (Germany). "The ELROB is conducted in order to provide an overview of the European state-of-the-art in the field of UGVs with focus on short-term realizable robot systems. With regard to available capabilities, the organisers seek to promote innovative technical approaches that will enable the operation of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). Representatives of military, border patrol, special forces, police, fire brigades, and civil protection agencies from the major European countries will attend. The ELROB will be accompanied with a comprehensive exhibition covering a wide variety of robotics aspects." artist's concept of Deep Space 1

  • Also see: Europe's Robotic Challenge - Next month, Germany will host Europe's version of DARPA's Grand Challenge -- but don't expect desert-busting autonomous SUVs. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review (April 14, 2006).

Third Grand Challenge - Urban Challenge Moves to the City. DARPA press release (May 1, 2006). "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced plans to hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007. The DARPA Urban Challenge will feature autonomous ground vehicles executing simulated military supply missions safely and effectively in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions. DARPA will award prizes for the top three autonomous ground vehicles that compete in a final event where they must safely complete a 60-mile urban area course in fewer than six hours. First prize is $2 million, second prize is $500,000 and third prize is $250,000. To succeed, vehicles must autonomously obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles."

  • Also see:
    • Video report: Ghost Cars of the Mojave Desert. TIME (November 15, 2007). "Lev Grossman checks out the DARPA Urban Challenge for robotic cars."
    • DARPA's Robot Car Race Hits the City - 2007 Preview (with Video). By By Erik Sofge. Popular Mechanics (October 2007). "It’s a mercilessly hot day in Robot City, Carnegie Mellon University’s 40-acre test site on the banks of Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River. Dozens of spectators line the bleachers overlooking a looping, two-lane test track. One of them raises his hand and asks the question on everyone’s mind: 'What are the chances that it could turn into a HAL?' The 'it' refers to Boss, the robotic Chevy Tahoe being inspected by officials from DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development wing. ... This is a qualifying round for the upcoming Urban Challenge, a robotic car race set in a mock city. ... This year’s race, scheduled for November 3, promises to be DARPA’s most complex yet. A cross between a DMV driving test and a rally race, the event will require vehicles to merge, pass, park and generally stay out of trouble, all while trying to complete the course within 6 hours. ... I’m loaded into the back seat for what I assume will be a leisurely ride. Boss has other plans. ..."
    • Robot car to tackle city streets - Stanford Racing Team has big plans for 2007 Grand Challenge. By Rahul Kanakia. The Stanford Daily Online (October 11, 2006). "Look, Ma, no humans. Such is the rallying cry of the Stanford Racing Team, composed of nearly forty Stanford faculty, researchers and graduate students. The team has been in collaboration with Volkswagen’s Silicon Valley lab to try to win the 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, seeking a car that can navigate a simulated urban environment for sixty miles in less than six hours, without any human guidance. To win the $2 million prize money, the Stanford team must do all this while finishing first in what will likely be a field of more than thirty teams. ... 'I don’t think cars will become autonomous instantly,' [Michael] Montemerlo said, pointing to 'smart' anti-lock brakes that are already in cars. 'You should think of that car as being just a tiny bit autonomous. Cars are going to have more and more of these adaptive systems and one day you’ll wake up, and you’ll have a car that’s able to drive itself.'"
  • And see these additional resources.

The Great Robot Race. NOVA. "Join NOVA for an exclusive backstage pass to the DARPA Grand Challenge -- a raucous race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the Pentagon, which awards a $2 million purse to the winning team." Not only can you watch the program (which first aired on March 28, 2006) online, but you can take advantage of the many exciting resources offered online, such as:

  • Cars That Drive Themselves: "In a lively interview, Stanford's Sebastian Thrun shares his excitement about real-world applications for autonomous vehicles."
  • What Robots See: "In this slide show, look out through the 'eyes' of computer-driven vehicles."

Robots serve humans on land, in sea and air. By Lauren J. Clark, School of Engineering. MIT News Office (March 2, 2005). "There's still a long way to go before today's robots evolve into practical, everyday technologies, but even now, autonomous robotic vehicles developed at MIT are exploring uncharted or hazardous places, assisting troops in combat and performing household tasks."

"The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) is the world's largest non-profit organization devoted exclusively to advancing the unmanned systems community. AUVSI, with members from government organizations, industry and academia, is committed to fostering, developing, and promoting unmanned systems and related technologies." Resources include:

Land

Third Grand Challenge - Urban Challenge Moves to the City. DARPA press release (May 1, 2006). "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced plans to hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007. The DARPA Urban Challenge will feature autonomous ground vehicles executing simulated military supply missions safely and effectively in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions. DARPA will award prizes for the top three autonomous ground vehicles that compete in a final event where they must safely complete a 60-mile urban area course in fewer than six hours. First prize is $2 million, second prize is $500,000 and third prize is $250,000. To succeed, vehicles must autonomously obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles."

DARPA Grand Challenge. "The second DARPA Grand Challenge, a field test designed to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles that someday will help save lives on the battlefield, will be held on October 8, 2005."

  • In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner, but Not a Driver. By John Markoff. The New York Times (October 9, 2005; registration req'd.). "The Stanford scientists who led the 18-month effort to build Stanley said they saw their victory as a significant leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence, a discipline that has long suffered from big promises that did not pan out. 'This is for people who say, "Cars can't drive themselves,"' said Sebastian Thrun, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-leader of the Stanford team. 'These are the same people who said the Wright brothers wouldn't fly.' ... 'The Grand Challenge has been conquered,' Dr. [Anthony J.] Tether said. ... Mr. Thrun, of the Stanford team, said advances in the field of self-driving vehicles would start to come more quickly. 'Extrapolate two, three or four years out, and then let your imagination play,' he said."
  • Innovations from a Robot Rally - This year's Grand Challenge competition spurred advances in laser sensing, computer vision and autonomous navigation -- not to mention a thrilling race for the $2-million prize. By W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American (January 2006). "More important than the race itself are the innovations that have been developed by Grand Challenge teams, including some whose robots failed to finish or even to qualify for the race. These inventions provide building blocks for a qualitatively new class of ground vehicles that can carry goods, plow fields, dig mines, haul dirt, explore distant worlds--and, yes, fight battles--with little or no human intervention. 'The potential here is enormous,' insists Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also head of its robot racing team. 'Autonomous vehicles will be as important as the Internet.'"
  • The Great Robot Race. NOVA; PBS broadcast date: March 28, 2006. "Join NOVA for an exclusive backstage pass to the DARPA Grand Challenge -- a raucous race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the Pentagon, which awards a $2 million purse to the winning team."
  • No driver? No problem for unique 'smart' car. By Kevin Coughlin Newhouse News Service / available from The Times-Picayune (December 18, 2005). "California motorists may want to stay off the road Oct. 8, 2007. That's when a vehicle may be cruising from San Francisco to Los Angeles all by itself, exploring the possibilities of last month's stunning triumph in the Mojave Desert by a robotic Volkswagen named Stanley. 'If you see a Passat coming by, driving slightly erratically, it's us,' a grinning Sebastian Thrun [director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory] told students Tuesday at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. ... Thrun said Stanford hopes to road-test a driverless model on the second anniversary of the Grand Challenge victory with a 400-mile drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A German professor named Ernst Dickmanns experimented nearly 20 years ago with autonomous vehicles on highways. But Thrun said Stanley had to be smarter to navigate the rough-and-tumble desert."
  • For more news articles about the race, see our October 2005 AI in the news archive.

Precise Path Robotics: "developing a line of self-guided mobile robots for outdoor turf applications."

  • Also see: Anatomy of an entrepreneur - How inventor Scott Jones got his start. By Julie Sloane. Fortune Small Business Magazine via CNNMoney.com (October 11, 2007). "[I]n 2005 Jones sponsored a team to compete in the second DARPA Grand Challenge.... Because of a small technical glitch, the $400,000 robot peeled out at the starting line, veered right, and crashed into a wall. Jones, however, encourages his employees to take ideas and turn them inside out until they make sense as a business. He ended up building a company out of his robot technology, but not quite the one he imagined. ... Precise Path, which is developing robotic lawn mowers that will neatly mow golf course greens."

Flying eyes. By Helen Knight. The Engineer (December 10, 2004). "A fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles will co-operate with a ground robot on surveillance tasks in the Australian Outback, in trials to be held next year by BAE Systems. The series of trials are being organised by researchers at the company's Advanced Technology Centre (ATC), to demonstrate its autonomous systems, data fusion and artificial intelligence technologies. ... 'We hope to deploy a land vehicle in some preliminary experiments, where we would have air vehicles gathering information, and we will look at how they would interact with something on the ground, perhaps by giving it information it can use to decide where it should move to, to participate in the sensing task,' [Dr Phil Greenway] said. ... To allow the system to deal with uncertainties such as incomplete observations, problems with sensors or deliberate attempts to fool it by enemy forces, the team is using Bayesian network technology. These networks, based on statistical pattern recognition, use probability theory to cope with such uncertainties."

Optically-Guided Bus: "Now buses on real-life autopilot are coming to Las Vegas." One of TIME.com's Best Inventions of 2001 (November 11, 2001).

NOMAD, a Carnegie Mellon University robot, traveled to the Antarctic in January 2000 in search of meteorites.

No Hands Across America. "During this tour of America, which was sponsored by Delco Electronics, AssistWare Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, two researchers from CMU's Robotics Institute "drove" from Pittsburgh, PA to San Diego, CA using the RALPH computer program. RALPH (Rapidly Adapting Lateral Position Handler) uses video images to determine the location of the road ahead and the appropriate steering direction to keep the vehicle on the road. (The researchers handled the throttle and brake.)"
Related Pages:

ArtDir:lanes.gif"highway lanes Autonomous Vehicle Control. From SRI. An easy to understand chart and explanation await you at this site as well as a link to videos of Flakey, SRI's autonomous robot, in action.

  • Don't miss their other videos, including: " Shakey - Shakey was one of the first autonomous mobile robots, built at the AI Center during 1966-1972. This film, SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning, was produced by Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson around 1969."

URBIE. "This urban robot (Urbie) is a joint effort of JPL, IS Robotics, the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Southern California Robotics Research Laboratory. Although Urbie's initial purpose is mobile military reconnaissance in city terrain, many of its features will also make it useful to police, emergency and rescue personnel. The robot is rugged and well-suited for hostile environments and its autonomy lends Urbie to applications that involve dangerous situations. Such robots could investigate urban environments contaminated with radiation, biological warfare, or chemical spills." Visit their site and see URBIE in action!

Global Positioning System used in the First Annual Autonomous Lawn Mower Competition. Landscape Management Week in Review (June 29, 2004). "The first annual Autonomous Lawn Mower Competition was held here on June 4 in association with the 60th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Navigation. Three university teams competed to build a machine that would efficiently and autonomously mow a field of grass using the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS)."

Autonomous Agricultural Production at the University of Illinois Agricultural Engineering Department. Watch a tractor plant a crop all by itself!

Autonomous Land Robots at The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego (SSC San Diego). Meet ModBot, ROBART, and others when you visit this site.

Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center: a partnership between the California Department of Transportation and UC Davis. Projects include Mobile Robots: "A tethered mobile robot is a self-propelled, automated device that can operate intelligently in close proximity to a support vehicle. The use of mobile robots can enhance worker safety, reduce maintenance costs, and improve operational efficiency." Also see this related article below.

"The Ohio State University Center for Intelligent Transportation Research (CITR) has developed three automated vehicles demonstrating advanced cruise control, automated steering control for lane keeping, and autonomous behavior including automated stopping and lane changes in reaction to other vehicles."

Sea -- Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV)

AUV Research Projects. A collection of pointers to groups and projects.

Into the deep - Robots explore Earth's hidden depths: An intelligent, unmanned submarine is exploring Earth's most inhospitable places. Next stop: Jupiter's moons. By Danny Bradbury. The Independent Online Edition (April 25, 2007). "Next month, an 'autonomous explorer robot' (AER) named DepthX will face its biggest challenge. The US team behind the AER proved the machine's worth in February when they sent it to the bottom of a well-charted sinkhole in Mexico. ... In the next few weeks, researchers will send it to the bottom of El Zacatón, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. No one knows how deep this mysterious hole is;.... The word that makes DepthX special is 'autonomous'. The robot is designed to operate under its own steam, making decisions for itself without the help of researchers. It is already going where no one has gone before on this planet, but this autonomy will become even more important when robots are sent to explore other worlds. The long distances involved in space travel make it difficult to guide a robot based on what it tells people about its environment. 'Mars is fairly close to Earth right now, but one-way communication still takes 20 minutes,' says Wolfgang Fink, head of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). 'If you were to go to Titan [one of Saturn's moons], then you're dealing with over an hour.' Nasa scientists spend painstaking hours instructing guided explorers, but building a robot that can guide itself is the next logical step. In the meantime, while galactic plans are hatched, a mission to Antarctica's Lake Bonney is another good example of why autonomy is important."

  • Visit the DepthX project site at The Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotic Institute.
  • Also see: Swimming to Europa - A robot designed to explore Mexican sinkholes is pointing the way to Jupiter's watery moon. By Jean Kumagai. IEEE Spectrum Online (September 2007). "Their goal is to field-test one of the most intelligent and agile underwater robots ever crafted, a possible predecessor of a machine that might someday swim the vast, ice-crusted ocean of Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa. Called DEPTHX, for DEep Phreatic THermal eXplorer, ..."

Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe (SAUC-E): for teams from European education institutions.

The Microtransat Challenge: "a transatlantic race of fully autonomous sailing boats. The race aims to stimulate the development of autonomous sailing boats through friendly competition."

  • Meet "roboat", developed by the Austrian Association for Innovative Computer Science's (InnoC) and winner of the 2006 event.
sub diving

Robot submarines make waves. Photo essay from CNET News.com (August 9, 2006) about the 9th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition.

AQUA: An Amphibious Autonomous Robot. By Robot Gregory Dudek, Philippe Giguere, Chris Prahacs, Shane Saunderson, Junaed Sattar, and Luz-Abril Torres-Mendez, McGill University, Michael Jenkin, Andrew German, Andrew Hogue, Arlene Ripsman, and Jim Zacher, York University, Evangelos Milios, Hui Liu, and Pifu Zhang, Dalhousie University, Martin Buehler, Boston Dynamics, Christina Georgiades, MathWorks. Computer 40(1): January 2007, 46-53. "AQUA, an amphibious robot that swims via the motion of its legs rather than using thrusters and control surfaces for propulsion, can walk along the shore, swim along the surface in open water, or walk on the bottom of the ocean. The vehicle uses a variety of sensors to estimate its position with respect to local visual features and provide a global frame of reference."

  • Also see: Gone Swimmin' - An amphibious robot explores aquatic environments and could help save coral reefs, too. By Michelle Théberge and Gregory Dudek. IEEE Spectrum Online (June 2006). "The mechanical hexapod, called Aqua, is the latest in a series of seagoing robots our research group at McGill University, in Montreal, has been developing in collaboration with teams led by Michael Jenkin at York University, in Toronto, and Evangelos Milios at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, N.S., Canada. Our goal is to develop an underwater vehicle that can autonomously explore and collect data in aquatic environments while surviving the harsh saltwater conditions and often turbulent waters of the open sea. In building Aqua, we are tackling one of the most challenging topics in robotics: integrating vision and locomotion into an amphibious machine that can determine what it is 'seeing,' where it is, and where it is going. But more than just providing an interesting engineering exercise, Aqua, we hope, will someday play an important role in protecting coral reefs."

'Mushroom' robot to plumb the depths. The Engineer Online (March 13, 2007). "After a successful deep-water test in Mexico, a NASA-funded autonomous robot [Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer, or DEPTHX] is a step closer to proving its ability to carry out a mission to seek life on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. ... DEPTHX is built to find its own way around an underwater cave without tethers, guidance or outside communication. ... Autonomous navigation is only half of DEPTHX's mission, however. The robot will also have the ability to identify targets of scientific interest and bring them back alive."

Rensselaer Researchers Experiment With Solar Underwater Robots. RPI Campus News (December 6, 2004). "A collaborative group of researchers are conducting experiments with underwater robots at Rensselaer's Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) on Lake George, N.Y., as part of the RiverNet project, an NSF-funded initiative. The group is working to develop a network of distributed sensing devices and water-monitoring robots, including solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicles (SAUVs), for detection of chemical and biological trends that may guide the management and improvement of water quality."

Stealth underwater craft targets minefields - Autonomous technology may make mine clean-ups safer. By Mark Peplow. news @ nature.com (March 23, 2006). "An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator. ... The Talisman craft is a prototype to demonstrate how autonomous technology developed for land and aerial vehicles can also be used underwater, says Andy Tonge, manager of BAE Systems' UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) project in Waterlooville, UK, which developed the sub. They hope to create a market for the vehicles by convincing military customers that it could save them time, equipment, and even lives."

Swimming to Spain. By Gregory Mone. Popular Science (April 04, 2006). "An underwater robot attempts a record-breaking voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, fishing for signs of global warming along the way. See it in action in an exclusive video inside. ... An autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, Spray is a joint venture between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California."

What is a "Scarebot?" LSU Highlights (April 2002). "Aquatic farmers share a similar problem: the encroachment of predatory birds on their crops. In Louisiana, birds such as cormorants and pelicans are drawn to aquatic environments that provide a reliable feeding source of fish and crawfish. For this reason, the Louisiana aquaculture industry has suffered crop loss resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue.[Steve] Hall and [Randy] Price have developed a unique approach to the problem. 'Scarebot,' an autonomous robot designed to frighten birds from crop ponds, is a small, solar-powered boat that can run unattended for long periods of time, at speeds of 5-7 miles per hour."

Underwater Robots. By Jack Penland. ScienCentral News (September 16, 2003). "We’ve all seen the military use tracking dogs on land, but what about underwater? As this ScienCentral News video reports, the Navy’s newest generation underwater robots fill the role very well. They look like everything from torpedoes to bomb disposal robots to small submarines, but they’re not -- they’re the Navy’s newest wartime technology called 'Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,' or AUVs. ... [T]he Navy is actively pursuing and testing new designs. It has an annual event, called 'AUV Fest' where engineers from all over the country test their designs under similar ocean conditions." [The video is available in both Quicktime & Realmedia format.]

Autosub - National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

  • Autosub Under Ice: "a £5.86 million programme to explore the marine environment beneath floating ice shelves using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the programme brings together oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, biologists and engineers from fourteen UK institutions to investigate the role of sub-ice shelf processes in the climate system."
  • Robot sub finds Antarctic food stash. BBC (March 7, 2002).

Autonomous underwater vehicles. Maintained by Uwe R. Zimmer. Be sure to see the extensive collection of AUV groups and projects from around the world.

"DRIP (Dinky Robot In Pool) was built by KISS Institute and was its first foray into AUVs. DRIP is one of the smallest and least expensive underwater robots around. DRIP displaces approximately ten pounds of water and cost less than $1000 to build. As currently outfitted, the robot cruises through the water looking for a light to follow. A short QT movie of DRIP following a light while in the University of Maryland's neutral buoyancy tank can be seen...."

Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI), formerly the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory (MSEL): "a not-for-profit research institute focused on promoting commercial applications of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), platforms and sensors."

Air

The fly's a spy - A new type of flying machine is watching you. The Economist (November 1, 2007). "As it flits from room to room its video-camera 'eye' transmits pictures to a screen on a remote-control unit strapped to the wrist of its clandestine operator. This is not a scene from a James Bond film, in which 007 tests a new device from 'Q', but an animated video produced by Onera, France's national aerospace centre, to explain REMANTA, a project to develop the technologies needed for miniature robotic aircraft. More bug-like flying devices are being developed in other research laboratories around the world. ... Having evolved from military use, drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are taking to the air in increasing numbers for public-service and civilian roles. ... However, the growing use of UAVs is causing a number of concerns. The first is safety. Last month America's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its first-ever investigation into an unmanned-aircraft accident. ... The second concern is privacy."

Out of the shadows. The Engineer Online (January 29, 2007). "Just a few years ago the idea of a robot combat aircraft was little more than a glint in the eye of the most forward thinking military scientist. While remotely operated drones used for reconnaissance have been around for some time the autonomous, unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) has remained in that shadowy area where military secrecy and the whispered rumours of science-fiction geeks make the truth hard to find. But now the veil of secrecy is beginning to slip and, in both the US and here in the UK, the use of robotic combat aircraft is fast becoming a reality of modern warfare. Under a £124m MoD contract announced late last year, UK engineers have begun work on the development of a prototype unmanned air vehicle (UAV) that could pave the way for a new generation of autonomous, stealthy aircraft and ultimately spell the end for human bomber pilots. Headed by BAE systems, the aim of the portentous-sounding Taranis project (named after the Celtic god of thunder), is to build and fly a technology demonstrator that will autonomously travel long distances deep into enemy territory and sneak past sophisticated air-defence systems. ... One of the biggest keys to Taranis' stealthiness will be its autonomous operation. While most production UAVs now in use are remotely operated Taranis, said [Chris] Clarkson, will operate with an unprecedented degree of autonomy. 'It needs to have intelligence in its mission systems to allow it to route round threats and take evasive action if it needs to do so, without having to have a human involved.'"

Autonomous Fire Scout UAV Lands on Ship. Press release from Naval Air Systems Command Public Affairs / available from Navy NewsStand (January 24, 2006). "The Navy’s Unmanned Aerial System program office, and the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Tactical Unmanned Air Vehicle (VTUAV) Program completed a major developmental milestone as the VTUAV system completed nine autonomous landings aboard USS Nashville (LPD 13). One air vehicle [RQ-8A Fire Scout ] performed the initial tests with three landings Jan. 16, and a second air vehicle was launched Jan. 17 to complete the testing. This is the first time a major defense autonomous UAV acquisition program has completed a landing aboard a fleet vessel."

UC Berkeley researchers field testing low-altitude robo-copters. By Sarah Yang. UC Berkeley News (December 15, 2004). "Members of the university's Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program have successfully conducted a series of field tests with 130-pound helicopters that not only fly autonomously -- without human control -- but that also react to avoid obstacles in their flight path. 'Our BEAR group is the first to successfully develop a system where autonomous helicopters can detect obstacles, stationary or moving, and recompute their course in real-time to reach the original target destination,' said David Hyunchul Shim, a research engineer on the project who first began this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering."

Robotics gains in prestige, in part due to military conflicts. By Charles Sheehan. Associated Press / available from USA Today (April 8, 2004). "Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer at Georgia Tech, is holding the fourth annual International Aerial Robotics Competition in July. Robotic aircraft will be required to fly three kilometers (1.8 miles) to an urban setting, find a building, then enter it via a window or a hole in the roof to find a target inside. The robot must then transmit an image back to base -- all without human interference."

  • Find out more by visiting the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Aerial Robotics Competition web page.
  • MIT's robotic helicopter makes first acrobatic roll. MIT News. (February 1, 2002). "Late last year the team achieved the first-ever autonomous acrobatic maneuver with a helicopter. An X-Cell 60 model rotorcraft, equipped with a seven-pound instrumentation box, performed a 360-degree aileron roll (a corkscrew-like maneuver) at high speed, after which it leveled itself and continued to fly. ... The MIT team believes their helicopter is the first to perform such stunts on its own. It does so at the flip of a switch on a remote control box."
  • Be sure to check out their collection of videos, including the autonomous roll videos.

MIT's intelligent aircraft fly, cooperate autonomously. MIT News Office release by Lauren J. Clark, School of Engineering (September 26, 2006). "MIT researchers, in collaboration with Boeing's advanced research and development arm, Phantom Works, are working to change that.They have developed a multiple-UAV test platform that could lay the groundwork for an intelligent airborne fleet that requires little human supervision, covers a wide area, and automatically maintains the 'health' of its vehicles (for example, vehicles anticipate when they need refueling, and new vehicles launch to replace lost, damaged, or grounded ones)." Be sure to follow the link at the end of the article to the project's web site.

  • Also see: MIT team guides airplane remotely using spoken English. MIT News Office release by Lauren J. Clark, School of Engineering (November 2, 2004). "'The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level -- not just 'turn right, turn left' but 'fly to this region and perform this task,' ' said Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. 'The pilot essentially treats the UAV as a wingman,' said Valenti, comparing the UAV to a companion pilot in a fighter-plane squadron."

New robot brain takes to the skies. By Heather Catchpole. ABC Science Online (December 18, 2003). "A new robot 'brain', based in part on the workings of the human inner ear, has enabled the production of the world's first small robotic helicopter that can see and think for itself, say Australian researchers. The 'brain' and helicopter - called 'Mantis' - was announced this week by CSIRO Complex Systems Integration. Autonomous helicopter flight is characterised by helicopters that can fly without a human pilot or guidance from a remote-controlled device. ... 'The major task in developing Mantis was to produce an inertial sensing system and a computer vision system to control and provide flight stability and to guide the aircraft,' said [Dr Peter] Corke."

Global Hawk pilotless aircraft. (2002). Global Hawk can fly autonomously for 36 hours at altitudes up to 65,000 feet (nearly twice the height used by commercial airliners). Its sensors can image an area twice the size of Tasmania (40,000 square miles) in just 24 hours, no matter what the weather condition, and relay the imagery with startling clarity in near real time to battlefield commanders.

Global Hawk vehicle no. 5 was deployed to Australia from 24 April to 7 June 2001 to participate in a series of test flights and the biennial Australian-US exercise Tandem Thrust 2001. Global Hawk completed the first trans-Pacific non-stop flight by a pilotless aircraft from Edwards Air Force Base California to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Base Edinburgh (South Australia) in 23 hours and 23 minutes, setting a Guinness World Record for "the longest flight ever by a full-scale unmanned aircraft."

Autonomous Flying Helicopter. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Autonomous Flying Vehicle Project at the University of Southern California.

helicopter

Autonomous Helicopter Project at Carnegie Mellon University. Goals: "To develop a vision-guided robot helicopter which can autonomously carry out the following goal mission in any weather conditions and using only on-board intelligence and computing power. ... This goal mission capability encapsulates a number of crucial technologies which are applicable to search and rescue, surveillance, law enforcement, inspection, mapping, and aerial cinematography."

The Ascent of the Robotic Attack Jet. By David Talbot. Technology Review (March 2005). "Compared to many aeronautical curiosities that have taken wing at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at California’s Edwards Air Force Base over the years, the latest military test stunts did not appear very remarkable. Last April, a low-slung aircraft, about the size of a sport utility vehicle but with batlike wings similar to those of the B-2 stealth bomber, took off, flew at 10,500 meters and then dropped a 110-kilogram inert precision bomb while zipping along at 700 kilometers per hour. Four months later, a pair of the aircraft took off and flew together. These were modest stunts, to be sure, except for this fact: the jets have no pilots. They are the future of warfare, the first working models of networked autonomous attack jets, and the U.S. Department of Defense would like to start building them by 2010. ... Realizing this vision will require the creation of new airborne communications networks and a host of control systems that will make these jets more autonomous (though always under the ultimate control of a person) than anything built to date. These are the goals of a $4-billion, five-year program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s advanced research arm."

Timeline of UAVs. Just one of the resources that you can find at NOVA's Spies That Fly web site.

Outer Space & Other Worlds

NASA Announces Prize for Digging Moon Dirt. SPACE.com (September 20, 2005). "NASA announced Tuesday a $250,000 prize for the team that can win a lunar dirt-digging contest that will take place here on Earth. The competition will pit robots to see which can excavate the most lunar regolith (a fancy word for soil) and deliver it to a collector. The challenge will be held in late 2006 or early 2007. ... 'This challenge continues NASA's efforts to broaden interest in innovative concepts,' said Brant Sponberg, NASA's Centennial Challenges program manager."

On space station, droids get a workout. 'Smart' orbs, now being tested on the space station, may become NASA's worker bees in space. By Peter N. Spotts. The Christian Science Monitor (July 11, 2006). "Cue the John Williams theme and roll the vanishing intro - Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi-training droids have arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). Or at least David Miller's versions have arrived. The free-floating spheres are set to test new concepts for 'smart' satellites. Able to fly in precision formation, the robots may one day hold the key to building everything from huge space telescopes that can peer deeply into the universe to constellations of small, cheap satellites that can monitor changes on Earth. ... If the experiment, dubbed SPHERES, sounds like science fiction, perhaps that's because it was inspired in part by it. ... The project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA. These agencies are interested in intelligent docking systems that can autonomously sense trouble and use their thrusters to compensate."

NASA's Robotic Explorers.

Aerobot aims for Titan - Robotic plane could survey alien moons or Amazon rain forest. By Mark Peplow. news@nature.com (September 1, 2005). "An intelligent floating robot could help to explore Saturn's moon Titan, following flight tests that prove it can survey large areas of land completely autonomously. ... The [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] team tested the artificial intelligence of its 11-metre-long airship over a dry lake bed in El Mirage, California, last year. The craft was able to explore areas that lay several kilometres away from its launch site in less than an hour, working out its own route between sites of interest that had been chosen by scientists before the flight. The robot corrected its path whenever it was blown off course, and could also assess danger from air turbulence by sensing wind speeds, changing its altitude to reach calmer air when necessary."

Autonomous military satellite to inspect others in orbit . By Kelly Young. NewScientist.com news (April 12, 2005). "The US Air Force has launched a micro-satellite that could lead to an autonomous robotic mechanic that fixes satellites in orbit. ... During its mission, the XSS-11 craft will approach dead or unused US satellites or old rocket parts. At each rendezvous, the Air Force satellite will burn its engines to move around the object while taking a range of pictures. Normally, ground controllers instruct a satellite when to fire its engines. But, after a commissioning and testing phase, XSS-11 will only take instruction on where to find a dead satellite. Then, with its on-board planner, it will calculate when to burn its engines. ... NASA is also interested in using such technology for a Mars-sample-return mission, so that a lander would be able to dock autonomously with a mother ship after a visit to the surface. Spacecraft autonomy is one of the requirements for President George W Bush’s plan for human missions to the Moon and Mars."

Smarter robots of tomorrow - NASA Ames scientists are advancing the technology of remote exploration. By Benjamin Pimentel. San Francisco Chronicle & SFGate.com (March 7, 2005). "Buoyed by the success of two robotic rovers exploring the surface of Mars, NASA scientists are building smarter and more- agile robots that can rappel down cliffs, slither between cracks and even have the sense to detect trouble. ... And the NASA folks have high hopes the new machines could speed up research. ... With the K9, which is equipped with nine cameras, a scientist could simply point to a specific rock and the robot would figure out a way to do the task. 'We're putting in a lot of the smarts,' [Maria] Bualat said. Mike Deliman, an engineering specialist with Wind River Systems, the Alameda company that developed the two Mars rovers' operating system, noted that scientists had to give Spirit and Opportunity 'step-by-step instructions' including 'exact degrees of turn for each step.' 'Now we can just tell it, 'Go to the rock,' and it will make the determination if it is there,' he said. ... James Crawford, a NASA Ames computer scientist, said the more sophisticated software is part of the growing field of artificial intelligence."

Artist's concept of Mars Exploration Rover
  • Also see: Mars rover goes its own way despite concerns. By David L. Chandler. NewScientist.com news service (March 9, 2005). "The Mars rover Opportunity reached the rim of a small crater called Vostok, early on Wednesday morning, having completed a series of record-breaking autonomous drives over the last month. Of the 3400-plus metres it has covered since landing in January 2004, it 'sprinted' across more than 1000 m in the last month alone. For the engineering team, the most significant part of this speedy trek was a three sol - Martian day - drive by the rover under its own control, using newly-upgraded mobility software which improves its ability to make autonomous decisions when navigating around obstacles."
  • Artist's concept of Mars Exploration Rover, courtesy of NASA.

Nanorovers from NASA. "The Nanorover Technology Task is a technology development effort to create very small (10-100s of grams) but scientifically capable robotic vehicles for planetary exploration, which can easily fit within the mass and/or volume constraints of future missions to asteroids, comets, and Mars."

concept of Deep Space 1

Deep Space 1's REMOTE AGENT.Known as Remote Agent, the software operated NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft and its futuristic ion engine during two experiments that started on Monday, May 17, 1999. For two days Remote Agent ran on the on-board computer more than 60,000,000 miles (96,500,000 kilometers) from earth. The tests were a step toward robotic explorers of the 21st century that are less costly, more capable and more independent from ground control." The site offers many links for you to explore, including one to How It Works. [Artist's concept of Deep Space 1, courtesy of NASA]

Machines that Think. Artificial Intelligence Webcast from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (June 29, 2001). "The show is hosted by Alice Wessen, JPL Technology Outreach Lead. The guests will be autonomous software specialists Barbara Engelhardt and Russell Knight, FIDO rover lead system engineer Dr. Edward Tunstel, and Machine Vision Group Supervisor Dr. Larry Matthies."

Artificial Intelligence Software to Command Mission. Space Daily (May 29, 2001). "NASA software that thinks for itself and makes decisions without help from ground controllers will fly as the brains of triplet satellites in 2002. The software builds on previous efforts to use artificial intelligence to control a spacecraft (such as NASA's Remote Agent experiment, which controlled the Deep Space 1 spacecraft during portions of several days in 1999). However, this new software uses more advanced technology to respond more quickly to events and will command a mission continuously for a period of approximately three months. The Continuous Activity Scheduling, Planning Execution and Replanning (CASPER) software will guide a constellation of three identical miniature satellites, each weighing less than 15 kilograms (33 pounds). "

Halfway to Mars - How a hardy band of researchers braved freezing nights, bad food, and high winds in the Chilean desert to test the next generation of planetary rovers. By Jean Kumagai. IEEE Spectrum Online (March 2006). "[David] Wettergreen, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, in Pittsburgh, and his team have been roughing it here in the Atacama since August, and they'll remain until November, just as South America's spring gives way to summer. They've come to test out new concepts and designs for the next generation of planetary rover, because this place, more than any other on Earth, approximates the barren, arid rockiness of the Red Planet. Testing the rover means pushing the technology to its limits, and sometimes beyond. The robot is so unusual and so new that breaking down is, for now, anyway, what it's supposed to do. 'A hundred percent success means we're not really trying hard enough,' Wettergreen says. It isn't the most elegant-looking machine ever built. Weighing in at 180 kilograms, the rover, dubbed Zoë, looks something like a motorized, overgrown ice cream cart. But it is beautiful in the one way that really matters to planetary scientists: unlike all the rovers built thus far, Zoë can roam autonomously. ... The rover can even make some rudimentary decisions about what terrain to explore. In a set of experiments conducted in Chile, Zoë successfully determined which tests to run at a given location."

<<< Additional information about spacecraft can be found on our Astronomy and Space Exploration page. >>>

General Readings

Designers Take Robots Out of Human Hands. By Anne Eisenberg. The New York Times (February 28, 2002). "Researchers are working to create just such independent robots, endowing them with enough intelligence and versatility to be, in the jargon of the field, autonomous -- able to work out complex problems by computer without help from their creators. A robotic helicopter so endowed would be smart enough to spot a suitable place to land and then do so without any remotely controlled help; a terrestrial robot designed to travel on its own could change its shape from tanklike to snakelike when it needed to be narrow enough to enter a cave. Robots of this caliber are actually coming into being. 'Today, for the first time, people are creating autonomous robots that can function in novel situations, reasoning and then acting,' said Dr. Gaurav S. Sukhatme, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, who has jointly edited a special section in the March issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery that describes some of the emerging research on robot autonomy."

Battlefield Robots Leap From Science Fiction to Reality. By Brian Handwerk. National Geographic News (July 1, 2004). "Once the fantasy of science fiction, battlefield robots are now a reality. 'The whole idea is to take the war fighter out of harm's way,' Robin Laird said. Laird is supervisor of the Unmanned Systems Branch of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. 'In my mind, someday we'll be doing battle with robots -- not killing people,' said Laird, whose program serves all four branches of the U.S. military. ... Military robots can be used for disposing of explosives, combat engineering tasks like clearing mines or placing explosives, reconnaissance, detecting nuclear and biological agents, and hazardous materials cleanup, among others tasks. ... Though the goal is to disarm explosives without detonating them, the loss of a U.S. $50,000-robot is seen positively. 'We have lost robots because we [were] doing inspections -- and that makes us ecstatic,' Laird said. 'That means somebody didn't lose an arm. That's why were doing this. So those losses are successes.'"

Planes That Know What to Bomb. Smart robotic jet fighters may be delivered by 2008. By Stanley Holmes. BusinessWeek Online (November 12, 2001). "By the end of the decade, the military could be sending the first true robotic warplanes into battle. These autonomous weapons-on-wings would sniff out hidden enemy air defenses before human-piloted fighters or bombers ventured into enemy airspace, deliver up to 3,000 pounds of smart bombs and missiles, and even take on enemy fighter jets. Called unmanned combat air vehicles, or UCAVs, their presence is likely to redefine the role of warplanes--and even warfare itself--by giving machines more responsibility for attacking enemy targets."

From the Adaptive Systems Group at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence: Adaptive Testing - Publications. "Autonomous vehicles require sophisticated software controllers to maintain vehicle performance in the presence of vehicle faults. The test and evaluation of complex software controllers is a challenging task. The goal of this effort is to apply machine learning techniques to the general problem of evaluating an intelligent controller for an autonomous vehicle. The approach involves subjecting a controller to an adaptively chosen set of fault scenarios within a vehicle simulator, and searching for combinations of faults that produce noteworthy performance by the vehicle controller. The search employs a genetic algorithm."

Robots with The Right Stuff: "As the US war machine develops a digital air force of 'unmanned aerial vehicles,' it's only a matter of time before fighter planes without fighter jocks joust in some robot dogfight in the sky." By Phil Patton. Wired Magazine(4.03 - March 1996).

Robots That Repair Roads. By Jenn Shreve. Wired News (November 12, 2001). "For a highway maintenance worker, sealing cracks along the freeway is a lot like walking a tightrope without a net. Introduce a drunk driver or a flying chunk of debris, and a workaday job becomes a fatality statistic. A robot, on the other hand, knows no fear and works tirelessly and quickly: A day's worth of sealing cracks in the road can be finished in an hour."

Brainy 'Bots - NASA's own "Bionic Woman" is applying artificial intelligence to teach robots how to behave a little more like human explorers. By Annie Strickler and Patrick Barry. Science at NASA (May 29, 2001). "[T]he ultimate goal for Ayanna and her colleagues is 'putting a robot on Mars and walking away, leaving it to work without direct human interaction.' 'We want to tell the robot to think about any obstacle it encounters just as an astronaut in the same situation would do,' she says. 'Our job is to help the robot think in more logical terms about turning left or right, not just by how many degrees.'" And be sure to check out the collection of related links following the article.

The CLARAty Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. By Richard Volpe, Issa Nesnas, Tara Estlin, Daren Mutz, Richard Petras, and Hari Das. Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Aerospace Conference. This is just one of the publications available from the Robotic Autonomy Architecture Team.

  • What's CLARAty? ⁦ "Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy: This task is developing and implementing a comprehensive control architecture for multiple, disparate, interacting, planetary rovers. The control of these systems will utilize the architecture to implement artificial intelligence techniques for autonomous sequence planning, error handling, and recovery during surface operations in an unknown terrain."

Related AI Topics Pages

Other References Offline

Jochem, Todd and Dean Pomerleau. 1996. Life in the Fast Lane: The Evolution of an Adaptive Vehicle Control System. AI Magzine 17 (2): 11-50. "Giving robots the ability to operate in the real world has been, and continues to be, one of the most difficult tasks in AI research. Since 1987, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been investigating one such task. Their research has been focused on using adaptive, vision-based systems to increase the driving performance of the Navlab line of on-road mobile robots. This research has led to the development of a neural network system that can learn to drive on many road types simply by watching a human teacher. This article describes the evolution of this system from a research project in machine learning to a robust driving system capable of executing tactical driving maneuvers such as lane changing and intersection navigation."

AAAI Home   Recent Changes   Edit   History   Print   Contact Us
Page last modified on December 13, 2008, at 05:12 PM