Architectingasimulationanddevelopment

Abstract

Collaborative multi-robot teams have great potential to add capabilities and minimize risk within the military domain. The composition of these teams may range from multiple copies of the same model to heterogeneous ground, air, and water vehicles operating in concert. The novel and extremely complex nature of these autonomous systems requires a large up-front investment in design, modeling, simulation, and experimentation. Myriad design decisions must be made regarding the control architecture and general information ow for commands and status exchanged between robots and humans and among robot teams. In addition, decisions must be made on how to best assemble and deploy these teams. To assist in making these design decisions, we are developing an integrated environment that we hope will greatly facilitate the design, development, and understanding of how to con gure and use multi-robot teams for military applications and to accelerate the robots' deployment.