<title>Vision-guided heterogeneous mobile robot docking</title>

Abstract

Spot lord'. John 131 itch5. Will am K larquist'. Robin M urphv Center for Intelligent Systems, Science Applications International ('orp. Advanced Technology Offce. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agettcr Computer Science and Engineering. Universitr ot South I lorida ABSTRA CT learns (if heterogeneous mobile robots are a ke aspect of future unmanned systems for operations in complex and dr mimic urban environments, such as that envisioned b' DARPAs Tactical Mobile Robotics program. ( )ne example of an interaction among such team members is the docking of small robot of limited sensory and processino capahi I hr vitIi a larger. niorecapable robot. Applications for such docking include the transfer of po er. data, arid material, as el I as plir sical l combined maneuver or manipulation. A two-robot sr stem is considered in this paper. 1 lie smaller "tlirowahlc'' robot contains a video camera capable of imaging the larger "packable" robot and transmitting the imagery, lie packable robot can both sense the throwable robot through an onboard camera, as well as sense itself through the throable robots transnntted ideo. arid is capable of processing imagery from either source. This paper describes recent results in the development of control and sensing strategies Rr automatic mid-range docking of these two robots. I)ecisions addressed include the selection of which robot's image sensor to use and which robot to nianeuver. Initial experimental results are presented for dockiiig using sensor data from each robot. Keywords: heterogeneous. tactical mobile robots. vision, docking. marsupial. heterobotic SPIE Vol. 3839 . 0277-786X/99!$1O.OO Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/21/2015 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms

<title>Vision-based docking under variable lighting conditions</title>

“…Docking has been defined in [2,10] as achieving both a desired position and orientation relative to a dock. It is an essential ability of robots that have to physically interact with other devices, such as handing off material to another robot or mechanism in manufacturing.…”