Australian Researchers Developing Societies Of Robots With Potential Use On Earth And In Space

ROBO SPACE

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by Jason Held
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Aug 30, 2005
Groups of cooperating robotics working in hazardous environments will require a networked approach to systems design. One Australian research laboratory is leading the way.

Any human mission to Mars will require a high degree of robotic support to accomplish a wide variety and difficult tasks prior to human arrival. Tasks may require a large number of robots, cooperating with each other to handle multiple scientific and engineering objectives.

This becomes more complicated by the fact that the missions can change once humans arrive, requiring the "system of systems" of robots to now be redesigned for a completely new scenario.

What system can solve such a complicated problem? The system must understand itself in a highly intelligent way, by self definition based on the group's capable behaviour. With this knowledge it can reconfigure itself by adding or removing individual robots, or by changing their organization to fit mission requirements.

Researchers at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, a part of the Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (CAS), are tackling the problem from a network centric perspective. Their approach�network all of the people and platforms in the system.

If the platforms in the system are all networked they can communicate their performance metrics to everyone in the group. This information is then used to quantify a systems level understanding of the group's behaviour, called a system map.

System maps are created for each combination of platforms and organization. The best system map is then the system with the best behaviours to complete the mission. And what if the mission changes? The solution may be as simple as choosing a new system map.

Jason Held was an Army Major in US Strategic Command (formerly Space Command), and has deployed all over the world to support military space missions. He was a lead instructor at the Interservice Space Fundamentals Course teaching satellite design theory, propulsion theory, and orbital dynamics. Educated as a computer engineer, Jason worked hardware-software integration on the Wide Field Camera 3 portion of the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, as well as biomedical engineering projects. He is now a PhD student in Aerospace and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney�s Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), developing an automated�"Systems of Systems" approach to mission design for cooperative robotics.

ROBO SPACE

Robots Dive Into Student Competition

Houston TX (SPX) Aug 29, 2005
Overcoming underwater was the name of the game at Johnson Space Center's (JSC) Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) the third weekend in June as some 400 students from across North America competed in the fourth annual national competition for student-built underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROV).

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