Due to the change in the nature of security and armed conflict in urba areas, it has become an area of conflict that modern warfare must adapt to. In order to successfully patrol, secure and engage the enemy in urban terrain where unknown buildings and structures provide cover and vantage points over our Forces, we need to develop and deploy an advanced capability to improve situational awareness in these arenas while simultaneously minimize friendly force casualties. Significant to this research to solve this problem will be to the ability to equip the modern Soldier with the capability to cooperatively fuse data from both Ground and Aerial Systems to quickly map the internal structures of buildings and disseminate the information. This requires a need for structure mapping and visualization capability that can be quickly captured, processed, disseminated and viewed while keeping the Soldier out of the direct line of conflict. In this proposal, Technical Solutions, Inc. (TSI), with our academia partner the University of Florida Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics (CIMAR), will address these challenges and outline the research, development and delivery schedule necessary to solve the urban structure mapping challenge and meet the 3-D presentation requirements.
Benefits: For this project, we see a number of exciting commercialization possibilities. In both military and commercial arenas there exists a need to monitor remote areas, investigate potentially hazardous or dangerous buildings or caves, and have that data translated and disseminated to the appropriate authorities. Unfortunately these environments can be extremely dangerous for humans to enter or reduced man power initiatives dont facilitate having these capabilities, and in many cases these tasks are tedious. Having remote robotic sensors perform these tasks, removing the human element from danger, increases survivability and situational awareness. FEMA, remote medical, search and rescue, fire, police, boarder patrol, and other site evaluation agencies would benefit from such technologies to identify dangers, potentially trapped individuals, or assess the stability of a site during a catastrophe or hostage situation. Remote robotic platforms with various built-in sensors could also perform evaluations on airborne or ground leak particles in NBC contaminated environments. The accurate mapping of items could also transition to the manufacturing industry (steel, automobiles, manufactured homes, etc.) to monitor and regulate tolerances or find deficiencies in the product as it moves along the assembly process.
Keywords: Structure Mapping, Unmanned Ground/Aerial Vehicles, Sensor Data Fusion, 3-D Visualization, Laser Range Finder, Sonar Texture Classification, Multi-Platform Controller, Situational Awareness
