<title>Robot mother ship design</title>

Abstract

Small physical agents will be ubiquitous on the battlefield of the 21<SUP>st</SUP> century, principally to lower the exposure to harm of our ground forces. Teams of small collaborating physical agents conducting tasks such as Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RSTA); chemical and biological agent detection, logistics, sentry; and communications relay will have advanced sensor and mobility characteristics. The mother ship much effectively deliver/retrieve, service, and control these robots as well as fuse the information gathered by these highly mobile robot teams. The mother ship concept presented in this paper includes the case where the mother ship is itself a robot or a manned system. The mother ship must have long-range mobility to deploy the small, highly maneuverable agents that will operate in urban environments and more localized areas, and act as a logistics base for the robot teams. The mother ship must also establish a robust communications network between the agents and is an up-link point for disseminating the intelligence gathered by the smaller agents; and, because of its global knowledge, provides the high-level information fusion, control and planning for the collaborative physical agents. Additionally, the mother ship incorporates battlefield visualization, information fusion, and multi-resolution analysis, and intelligent software agent technology, to support mission planning and execution. This paper discusses on going research at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory that supports the development of a robot mother ship. This research includes docking, battlefield visualization, intelligent software agents, adaptive communications, information fusion, and multi- modal human computer interaction.