Autonomous robots could be used for Dept. of Homeland Security

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Autonomous robots could be used for homeland security

By Gary Robbins

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:02 a.m.


Nick Morozovsky works on a Switchblade robot at the Coordinated Robotics Lab on Tuesday at the University of California San Diego. The Switchblade is small robot that will be used in an anti-terrorism test.

A robot that can climb stairs even though it's just the size of a large dinner plate might evolve into a tool for detecting and evaluating biological and chemical attacks.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego are installing sensors on a small army of the robots. They want to see if the machines can spot and predict the movement of harmless smoke that will be released during an experiment on campus this summer.

"Ultimately, such a vehicle could be fitted with a variety of (chemical, radiation, biological) sensors, video or the like," said Thomas Bewley, the UCSD mechanical engineer and principal investigator who has been overseeing development of the gadgets in the university's Coordinated Robotics Lab.

The 11-pound, 1-foot-by-1-foot robot, known as Switchblade, is part of a larger push by UCSD and other schools nationwide to develop autonomous robots that can be used for homeland security and urban warfare. Among their supporters are top U.S. military commanders who envision that unmanned ground devices can reduce troop fatalities in a variety of situations, such as entering a house in Iraq or Afghanistan to search for deadly chemicals.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have been working on a tiny, one-winged helicopter, or "mono-copter," that might become invaluable for spying.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engineers have been constructing a gecko-like robot that also might play a role in surveillance.

The efforts already have produced the sort of bomb disposal robots featured in the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker."

"These projects, where we can coordinate with gifted university students and staff, can potentially become important lifesavers in devastating situations," said Nancy Ambrosiano, a spokesman at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Nick Morozovsky, one of Bewley's doctoral students, has taken a lead role for the Switchblade program. He and his colleagues are equipping 12 of the battery-powered robots — made of stainless steel and Delrin, a type of plastic — with sensors that can detect particulates from smoke. The smoke will be released in a parking lot on the UCSD campus.

The project has backing from National Instruments of Austin, Texas, and the Los Alamos lab.

"We'll have 12 robots running around all at the same time, measuring the smoke, its concentration and the wind velocity. The data will be sent to a supercomputer and be used to predict where the plume will expand to," Morozovsky said. "The robots will receive a command to go to a certain location, but they'll plan out their paths so that they can avoid collisions."

He sees potential value beyond homeland security.

"These kinds of robots could be used not only to detect bioagents, but things like the ash that was coming out of a volcano in Iceland and shutting down airports in Europe," Morozovsky said.

"You could have flying robots that would look to see where the ash would go, or you could put them in water and have them look at things like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There are a lot of potential uses."

Contributing writer Michelle Day provided information for this report.

Gary Robbins: (619) 293-1228;

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010 ... e-used-ho/