Labs software makes bomb 'bots smarter

Some 700 law enforcement officials gathered in Albuquerque recently for their first look at a wheeled police robot made smarter with Sandia software.

The prototype robot makes many of the "how to" decisions on its own, freeing up its operator to make the more critical "what to do next" decisions during stressful and potentially dangerous bomb-disablement missions.

Working with a commercially available robot on loan from REMOTEC Inc. of Oak Ridge, Tenn., Sandia automated many of the robot's complex movements while retaining the operator's ability to command the robot's behaviors.

The software, called SMART, for Sandia Modular Architecture for Robotics and Teleoperation, is expected to make police robots quicker, safer, easier to operate, and capable of more behaviors. It also could make available to on-scene commanders a greater number of tools for responding to a wider variety of situations.

A SMART-based robot with associated sensors and other tools could be pre- programmed, using software control sequences that allow the robot to grip tool A or go directly to point X rather than having individual movements controlled separately by the operator.

That would be useful, for instance, when you need to reach through a car window, grab an object, and back out without whacking the door. It will free up the human operator to think about what needs to happen and in what order -- which is what humans do better than machines -- rather than the monotonous and sometimes confusing details of moving joints.

Press Release:

http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN06-15-01/key06-15-01_stories.html#bot

Contacts:
Jake Deuel
(505) 845-8122
email:jkdeuel@sandia.gov