Lending A Robotic Hand

When an earthquake and tsunami devastated a nuclear power plant in Japan last year, repair workers could not get close to the overheating core.

Deadly radiation kept people at bay, but robots showed they had the “right stuff.”

Japanese officials used several iRobot PackBots to survey the damage and assess their next steps in averting a bigger disaster. PackBots employ the same technology on battlefields in Afghanistan for bomb disposal and life-threatening infantry missions.

Exploring all potential remedies, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers traveled to Japan to offer their assistance with their MAST Program aerial robots. MAST is the U.S. Army‘s Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology Collaborative Technology Alliance, studying miniature robotics.

“We could not go to Fukushima because we could not get authorization,” said Prof. Vijay Kumar. “We did all our experiments in a building that had collapsed because of the earthquake in Sendai, approximately 50 miles from Fukushima and 80 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.”

We conducted experiments with two ground robots (provided by collaborators at Tohuku University) and two aerial robots (ours). Four people were involved in the experiments.

UPenn researchers Shaojie (Frank) Shen, a Ph.D. Student, Kartik Mohta, an masters student and Nathan Michael, a research assistant professor traveled with Kumar to conduct experiments with two ground robots provided by researchers at Tohuku University. The team also tested two of their own aerial robots.

In the end, Japanese officials decided to take another route, but the cooperation highlights the potential future of responding to hazardous missions with specialized robots.

“We now have the models, algorithms and software to deploy autonomous aerial and ground robots for exploring and mapping collapsed buildings,” Kumar said. “Aerial robots can operate in unstructured, 3-D environments with limited interaction with a human operator. This is particularly important in hazardous environments where radiation can preclude good communication links.”

The UPenn team’s aerial robots use automated landing and take-off from a ground platform, which allow for sustained missions. The aerial platform is a commercially available aerial robot known as “The Pelican” by Ascending Technologies. An advantage of the flier over the PackBot is the ability to operate in three dimensions, Kumar said.

The key is to conserve battery life of the aerial robot.

“The ground and aerial robot operate synergistically,” he said. ” We want to have a team be deployed remotely. They fly in through whatever open windows and doors they can find, map the building and tell the soldiers what’s in the building, how many rooms, doors, potential threats, bad guys if they find them.”

Kumar said that current end-users are not ready for fully autonomous systems.

“In the short term, the operational paradigm will probably rely on supervised autonomy where the human user periodically interacts with the autonomous robots,” he said.

Kumar puts the advance of robots in perspective.

“The first twenty years of robotics (1960-1980s) mostly dealt with industrial robots, robots that were bolted to the shop floor,” he explained. “The applications were limited to factory operation with the focus on automation. The next twenty years or so (1990s-2000s) saw the advent of mobile, ground robots, with military applications that required on and off road autonomous driving and navigating urban environments. This phase of robotics will lead robotics into the third dimension.”

That next dimension is where robots fly through windows and roof tops to provide 3-D situational awareness and explore truly unstructured environments.

The UPenn team is already advancing on this front. Its aerial robots navigate and collaborate with each other while mapping environments in real time.

By Mr. David McNally, www.army.mil

 U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command

Army, Pentagon Seek Small, ‘Throwable’ Robots

Any fan of military technology will also love police technology!

By Kris Osborn, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Public Affairs

WASHINGTON (Army News Service) — The Army, Marine Corps and the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) are working to procure and deliver thousands of small, easily transportable “throwable” robots equipped with surveillance cameras designed to beam back video from confined spaces, buildings, tunnels and other potentially dangerous locations, service officials said.

“These robots can provide dismounted troops that extra bit of stand-off distance,” said Marine Corps Lt. Col. Dave Thompson, project manager, Robotic Systems Joint Project Office (RS JPO).

The Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JEIDDO, is in the process of responding to a joint urgent operational needs statement for an ultra-light recon robot capability to support dismounted operations in Afghanistan; combatant commanders are looking to receive an initial delivery of about 4,000 of the small robots, some of which are engineered to be thrown through a second-story window to provide “eyes” on a potentially hazardous combat situation, said Mathew Way, program integrator for Mitigate and Neutralize, JIEDDO.

After finishing up a market survey of which commercially-available technologies might be able to meet the needs of the Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statement (JUONS) — and quickly conducting testing on numerous small robots designed to establish quantitative data with the National Institute for Standards and Technology — JIEDDO chose three lightweight, “throwable” robots to run through a series of combat-assessments in Afghanistan.

Included among those systems are iRobot’s 110 First Look robot, MacroUSA’s Armadillo V2 Micro Unmanned Ground Vehicle, and QinetiQ North America’s Dragon Runner.

About 50 of each of these robots will be deployed with forces in different parts of Afghanistan in order to assess the capability of the “throwbots” to perform across different types of combat terrain. The bots will be placed with infantry, engineering and explosive ordnance disposal units, among others, Way said.

“What we are going to try to do is give a sampling of every type of system down range across different regions of Afghanistan. More than likely there will be more than one system needed to answer this JUONS (Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statement),” said Way.

The theater assessment in Afghanistan, called an “OCONUS” trail, or Outside the Continental United States, is aimed at informing development of requirements regarding the tasks the systems will be needed to perform.

“This OCONUS trial will give us the Soldier feedback that we need. This will allow us to go to industry and tell them what we want. JIEDDO can then use those precise requirements to support a rapid, open competition, to then field the final solution or solutions to fulfill the warfighter need,” Way said.

At the same time, the Army-led RS JPO is coordinating efforts across the DOD and also working on developing, purchasing, and deploying several of the small, mobile “throwable” robots such as iRobot’s First Look and the Recon Robotics Recon Scout XT Throwbot.

“This is an area of joint interest. JIEDDO has a large part of this, as does the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force and the Marine Corps. We are all looking at similar systems. RS JPO is trying to do some coordination between all of these organizations and see if we can look at the systems that are out there, look at the requirements, and start to posture ourselves for the sustainment and the maintenance of these systems in the long term,” said Thompson.

The anticipated value of the “throwbots” is in part driven by the frequency of dismounted small unit and squad patrols in Afghanistan, where Soldiers and Marines routinely check areas for IEDs and insurgent activity, Thompson explained.

At the moment, many units use the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle 320, a small tactical robot equipped with video reconnaissance technology that is 32 pounds. Still, there is a need for something that is lighter, more easily transportable by dismounted units on the move and able to be “thrown” into forward locations such as buildings and caves, Way and Thompson said.

THROWBOTS

The Recon Scout XT Throwbot, for instance, is only 1.2 pounds. The device is designed to withstand a 30-foot vertical drop and provide “eyes” or forward-positioned cameras able to capture images from dangerous locations. It is a small, barbell-shaped robot with wheels at each end of a titanium tube along with a camera, antenna and illuminator. The Recon Scout also includes an operator control unit with a small viewing screen and joystick. The Recon Scout is currently being acquired by the Army’s Rapid Equipping Forces, or REF.

“The Recon Robot XT responds to the Soldiers’ need to see where they’re going before they get there. With this throwbot capability, warfighters gain situational awareness of an area, thus mitigating risks and casualties,” an REF technology spokesperson said.

QinetiQ’s Dragon Runner, originally developed for the Marine Corps, weighs about 14-pounds and includes cameras, motion-detectors and an optional small manipulator arm able lift about 10-pounds.

iRobot’s First Look is about 10-inches long and weighs less than five pounds. The robot has four built-in cameras facing different directions and is engineered to withstand a 15-foot drop. It is waterproof up to three feet and is designed to climb steps as high as eight inches. The robot is configured like a miniature model of the well-known and widely used PackBot robot. The First Look’s sensor payload includes cameras, thermal imagers and chem-bio radiation sensors.

The Armadillo V2 is also about 5-pounds. It has four small wheels, is built to withstand eight-meter “throws” and also includes multiple cameras and thermal imaging.

This article first appeared on Army.mil.