pottie CISE120302

Robot Ecologies: 

Robot Ecologies Adapted from ISAT Briefing September 23, 1999 Gregory J Pottie UCLA Electrical Engineering Department NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing Sensoria Corporation

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...: 

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Bringing down centralized systems was child’s play

On Mars we hope to do better: 

On Mars we hope to do better “pathfinder” for exploration and/or transportation digger/planter (not to scale) tumbleweeds

The Robot Ecology: 

The Robot Ecology Build an ecology of ‘animal’- and ‘plant’-like robots Go beyond the idea of single mobile robots Develop the collective as a super-organism where no single part understands the whole The Robot Ecology is a self-constructing infrastructure supports diverse individual tasks and enables more complex missions handles system degradation gracefully is self-sustaining throughout mission life

Application Scenarios: 

Application Scenarios Remote exploration Tagging of people/trucks/ships/submarines Self-deploying communications/power network Search and rescue Battlefield surveillance, mine countermeasures Response to bio/chem attack Monitoring (infesting) a building Monitoring remote site for underground facilities (UGF) Support for military operations in urban terrain (MOUT)

UGF: 

UGF Threats: missile sites, weapons factories (e.g. biochem), command facilities, storage, weapons research What needs to be done: covertly characterize the facility (activity and structure) and possibly disrupt it Task List: monitor input/output of facility (roads, vents, effluent), sense nearby, sense inside, guide weapons, disrupt facility Steps: locate, infiltrate/disrupt, infestation, gather information; establish logistical chain for communication, sample retrieval and/or facility disruption

Underground Facility Characterization: 

Underground Facility Characterization   UAV follows; releases microflyers, “seeds” pods, creepers, burrs, mobile   (maybe satellite detect) burrowing device from mother plant down to buried targets  communication relay to hill creeper down air vent; burr placed inside; set up sensor net (vibrations, gases, etc.) [not to scale]

Symbiosis Between People and Robots: 

Symbiosis Between People and Robots The robot ecology needs to intermesh with the human organization in a symbiotic relationship People are better at some things Robots are better at some things Robots will be the remote extension of people Robots must support people rather than force people to support robots People are freed to make the higher level judgements in command without having to control The currencies of the self-sustaining robot ecology are energy and information they trade against each other and between themselves they need to be supplied at the right places and times

Robot Cooperation Challenges: 

Robot Cooperation Challenges Centralized systems are brittle and require excessive communications resources. Must identify effective heuristics for distributed coordination Communications and energy network self-organization cannot be general purpose Cooperation must be pursued in applications context Lack of operational data Field tests to discover the needed behaviors for particular missions, and integrate human operators and larger military/industrial infrastructure Lack of general theory of cooperation With a better understanding, can reduce number of experiments

Robot Ecology Today & Tomorrow: 

Robot Ecology Today & Tomorrow Today: Factory automation: adjust environment for convenience of robots Battlefield: unpredictable environment and no infrastructure, and thus many people to sustain each robot Tomorrow: Scaling More than 20 robots Heterogenous robots Diverse sets of robots working together in sustained missions Adaptivity Context-aware adaptation among members of the ecology for operation in unplanned environments

A Program Outline: 

A Program Outline Pick a scenario The union of all the scenarios lacks focus--build out from one E.g., installation perimeter security Can start in a non-covert way, and over time introduce covert aspects Can be operationally tested in parallel to existing methods Pursue a set of large scale experiments More than 20 robots working together Dynamic deployment Dynamic task exchange in the case of failures Heterogeneous robots - including plant and animal robots Pursue maintenance of energy economy as example of autonomous resupply Standardized parts and interfaces for plug and play with large community Integrate situation assessment with autonomous tagging and dynamic networking Pursue mathematical understanding of the systems level in order to get the right language to analyze how to generalize