The team of researchers from the U.S Army, Research, Development and Engineering Command Research Laboratory and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University have created a new technique that teaches robots, “Novel traversal behaviors with minimal human oversight”. Robots can navigate autonomously in an environment while carrying out tasks, using learned intelligence to reason and make decisions.
The research team’s goal is to create an autonomous, reliable partner for soldiers. The robot’s quick learning process and minimal dependence on humans are ideal for situations where missions are constantly changing. In dangerous scenarios, the robots can even keep soldiers free from harm by acting as initial investigators.
The work that the lab is doing is unique. “We seek to create intelligent robotic systems that reliably operate in warfighter environments, meaning the scene is highly unstructured, possibly noisy, and we need to do this given relatively little a priori knowledge of the current state of the environment”, according to lab researcher Dr. Wigness.
Though the evaluation has been conducted using Clearpath’s Husky UGV, the team has begun exploring how this behaviour can be transferred between mobile platforms.
To read more about this project, click here. To learn more about the Husky UGV and its applications, click the banner below.
