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Safe Robot Motion	Mapping Hazardous Environments
Shared Control Driving	Intelligent Dexterity
Human Tracking and Following	5D Surfer
Robot Interaction Tools	UAS/UGV Teaming

Safe Robot Motion

while also preventing harm to the environment or people in it. This includes safe motion of arms and sensors as well as the vehicle itself. Safe motion provides collision prevention at high speeds, but can also protect from negative obstacles (i.e. holes in the ground) and from hazards and areas of exclusion specified by the user. Safe motion behaviors interfere with operational commands as little as possible. When appropriate the robot may actually touch an obstacle or hazard to accomplish a task.

Shared Control Driving

The behaviors make it much easier to drive robots and can be customized for a wide variety of application areas in military reconnaissance and route clearance. Through intelligent behavior add-on kits, we can permit operators to use the vehicles intuitively without physically putting themselves in the driver's seat.

Human Tracking and Following

This enables robot use even in densely populated settings such as office buildings, outdoor markets and other forms of varied and dynamically changing terrain such as military patrols. 5D software enables robots to understand at a meta-level what is moving, changing, and approaching. This capability can be applied to a variety of military contexts where safety and human machine interaction are important.

Robot Interaction Tools

With 5D software, robots that can go right alongside their human users for many miles, requiring little guidance beyond cues such as "wait here," "follow me," or "take the next right turn." A special emphasis will be placed on enabling robots to move with humans, responding adroitly to bystanders as well as to on-the-move users. A hand-held device is used to cue the vehicle in an intuitive way from within a simple, but highly dynamic real-time visualization of the robot's local environment.

Mapping Hazardous Environments

The variation in threats faced by soldiers, must be met with versatility in terms of robotic capacity for using multiple hazard sensors effectively. These behaviors must effectively encapsulate the skill and techniques used by humans and allow the robots to effectively exploit a variety of hazard sensors, marking tools, and neutralization devices. The key mission areas where 5D is currently working include:

• Countermine Detection and Marking
• Exploring and Mapping Hazardous Tunnels
• Explosive Detection and Neutralization
• Detecting Chemical, Biological, Nuclear and Radiological Hazards

Intelligent Dexterity

5D is currently working to apply dexterous manipulation to checkpoint missions where the robot can scan vehicles for threats and also provide biometric assessments of humans including retinal scans and fingerprinting. 5D is also working to apply behaviors for reaching and grasping to assist a variety of mobile manipulation tasks. Technical components include:

• 3D Visualization to support arm articulation & dexterity
• "Rough reach" behaviors that bring the arm to a 3D point in space
• Articulated 3D control of end effectors

Facilitating simplified manipulation from mobile systems in dynamic, unstructured environments will dramatically change the way robots are use across a variety of applications including factory automation and military use.

5D Surfer

Each 5D Surfer kit is self-contained and able to function independently to provide GPS, power, video, illumination, mesh communications, computing, analysis software, plug and play sensor functionality, as well as an ability to provide plug and play control of unmanned ground vehicles. This turn-key kit can be plugged onto multiple robots to provide standardized control and intelligent behavior. It can also be detached and carried by hand or used on a manned vehicle. The 5D Surfer consists of three separable modules and can be reconfigured depending on the mission. These include the Core Module, the Situation Awareness Module and the Power Module. The Core Module includes a computer, GPS, a military mesh radio, and an interface plate for allowing power and data connection to a number of plug and play sensors. When these sensors are plugged in, the data then automatically flows into the mesh network, providing time and location meta-data alongside hazard information. This meta-data allows the hazard information to be correlated with a satellite image or with live UAS imagery. The Situation Awareness Module includes cameras, a video encoder board and a scanning laser. This module is of the same dimensions as the core module and plugs into the top to provide visual and 2D range data. Along with the time and position stamp, the 5D Surfer can then also correlate video and range data to the application sensor data. The laser mapping capability embedded into the 5D Surfer allows the application data to be represented in a real-time map of the surrounding environment.

UAS/UGV Teaming

Soldiers on the ground have old UGV/UAV data or none at all. There is an immediate need for a reliable tool to translate between different formats and search, store, retrieve & share critical data in real time. 5D provides tools to access, geo-reference & navigate real-time UAS data and combine it into the same interoperable OCU. Capabilities include:

• Interoperable, lightweight OCU with touch screen display, built-in GPS and mesh networking
• Identifies and localizes emerging data from ground and air
• Supports operator queries to locate hazards from within a specified region
• Find and share safe paths in real-time
• Provides tools to compare imagery from multiple time intervals
• Store imagery of key features or hazards together with annotations and then retrieve them based on position, type or time