Cooperative robotic sentry vehicles

John T. Feddema; Christopher L. Lewis; Paul Klarer; G. Richard Eisler; Rahul Caprihan

doi:10.1117/12.360355

26 August 1999 Cooperative robotic sentry vehicles

John T. Feddema, Christopher L. Lewis, Paul Klarer, G. Richard Eisler, Rahul Caprihan

Proceedings Volume 3839, Sensor Fusion and Decentralized Control in Robotic Systems II; (1999) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.360355
Event: Photonics East '99, 1999, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

As part of a project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Sandia National Laboratories' Intelligent Systems and Robotics Center is developing and testing the feasibility of a cooperative team of robotic sentry vehicles to guard a perimeter and to perform a surround task. This paper describes on-going activities in the development of these robotic sentry vehicles. To date, we have developed a robotic perimeter detection system which consists of eight 'Roving All Terrain Lunar Explorer Rovers' (RATLER), a laptop-based base-station, and several Miniature Intrusion Detection Sensors (MIDS). A radio frequency receiver on each of the RATLER vehicles alerts the sentry vehicles of alarms from the hidden MIDS. When an alarm is received, each vehicle decides whether it should investigate the alarm based on the proximity of itself and the other vehicles to the alarm. As one vehicle attends an alarm, the other vehicles adjust their position around the perimeter to better prepare for another alarm. For the surround task, both potential field and A* search path planners have been added to the base-station and vehicles. At the base-station, the operator specifies goal and exclusion regions on a GIS map. The path planner generates vehicles paths that are previewed by the operator. Once the operator has validated the path, the appropriate information is downloaded t the vehicles. For the potential field path planner, the polygons and line segments that represent the obstacles and goals are downloaded to the vehicles, instead of the simulated paths. On board the vehicles, the same potential field path planner generates the path except that it uses the true location of itself and the nearest neighboring vehicle. For the A* path planner, the actual path is downloaded to the vehicles because of limited on-board computational power.

Citation Download Citation

John T. Feddema, Christopher L. Lewis, Paul Klarer, G. Richard Eisler, and Rahul Caprihan "Cooperative robotic sentry vehicles", Proc. SPIE 3839, Sensor Fusion and Decentralized Control in Robotic Systems II, (26 August 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.360355

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