ROBOTIC RESEARCH OPCO, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A17-137

Description

The proposed effort, RACER, seeks to extend the MACS-B architecture with focus on enhancing the coordinated autonomy between robots. This work takes the proven autonomous capability from MACS-B and extends the high-level distributed coordination capability. Priorities include capturing user intent at a high level and transforming that intent into lower-level commands, visualizing these lower-level commands in an intuitive way, and simplifying simultaneous command of different types of robots. In order to realize a future where an operator can leverage multiple robotic platforms simultaneously with minimal attention, a new control architecture must be considered. Key factors include increasing autonomy of each robot so that a user does not need to monitor each platform constantly, thereby improving human/machine interfaces, and allowing the simultaneous control of multiple robots from a single control station by a single warfighter. The proposed effort addresses all three of these architectural enhancements. Robotic Research will augment the work performed on the MACS-B project with an architecture enhancement and capability that reduces an operators workload on a per-robot basis, progresses the operators interface to control each robot at a higher and more intuitive level, all while maintaining the capability to concurrently control multiple robots at the same time.