No abstract

In this paper, we present the component technologies and the integration of these technologies for the development of an adaptive system of heterogeneous robots for urban surveillance. In our integrated experiment and demonstration, aerial robots generate maps that are used to design navigation controllers and plan missions for the team. A team of ground robots constructs a radio signal strength map that is used as an aid for planning missions. Multiple robots are to establish a mobile, ad-hoc communication network that is aware of the radio signal strength between nodes and adapts to changing conditions to maintain connectivity. Finally, the team of aerial and ground robots is able to monitor a small village, and search for and localize human targets by the color of the uniform, while ensuring that the information from the team is available to a remotely located human operator. The key component technologies and contributions include (a) mission specification and planning software; (b) decentralized control for navigation in an urban environment while maintaining communication; (c) programming abstractions and composition of controllers for multi-robot deployment; (d) cooperative control strategies for search, identification, and localization of targets; and (e) three-dimensional mapping in an urban setting.

MissionLab is a mission specification system that implements a hybrid deliberative and reactive control architecture for autonomous mobile robots. The user creates and executes the robot mission plans through its graphical user interface. As robot deployments become more common in highly stressful situations, such as in dealing with explosives or biohazards, the usability of their mission specification system becomes critical. To address this need, a mission-planning "wizard" has been recently integrated into MissionLab. By retrieving and adapting past successful mission plans stored in its database, this new feature is designed to simplify the user's planning process. The latest formal usability experiments, reported in this paper, testing for usability improvements in terms of speed of the mission planning process, accuracy of the produced mission plans, and ease of use is conducted. This paper introduces the mission-planning wizard, describes the usability experiments (including design), and discusses the results in detail.

Gold has been chemically mobilised by groundwater from host sulphide minerals in orogenic gold deposits of Otago. Mobilisation occurred near the Cenozoic Otago Schist erosional surface beneath a sedimentary cover. Initial Au mobilisation, on a scale of micrometres, occurred when solid solution and microparticulate gold in pyrite and arsenopyrite grains were liberated by sulphide oxidation to iron oxyhydroxide pseudomorphs. Larger-scale mobilisation involved leaching of gold from up to 100-m-thick zones which were the target of historic mining, with up to 10× enrichment of Au in reprecipitation zones. Gold in the supergene zones is commonly crystalline with octahedral shapes and nuggety forms which fill cavities and coat prismatic quartz crystals. This gold retains some or all of the Ag (typically 2-8 wt%) from the primary source gold. Oxidised groundwaters that have interacted with sulphides become enriched in dissolved sulphate, but retain high pH (7-8.5). Under these conditions, metastable thiosulphate ions can dissolve and transport Au and Ag to be precipitated later by either oxidation or reduction.

A methodology for integrating multiple perceptual algorithms within a reactive robotic control system is presented. A model using finite state acceptors is developed as a means for expressing perceptual processing over space and time in the context of a particular motor behavior. This model can be utilized for a wide range of perceptual sequencing problems. The feasibility of this method is demonstrated in two separate implementations. The first is in the context of mobile robot docking where our mobile robot uses four different vision and ultrasonic algorithms to position itself relative to a docking workstation over a longrange course. The second uses vision, IR beacon, and ultrasonic algorithms to park the robot next to a desired plastic pole randomly placed within an arena.