Robotic Mine Detection System (RMDS)

Future military operations will see more vehicles operated from remote locations. When soldiers are asked to carry out missions that will require them to be at greater standoff distance, the cost includes degraded sensory information and the resulting limited system performance. Tele-operated systems required more time to perform a mission. This is due to the limited field of view, depth perception, vestibular cues, and other immersion reducing characteristics of remote operation. The need to provide operational improvements is recognized in many areas, including route clearing and mine detection systems. The Robotic Mine Detection System (RMDS) has provided a system for mine detection and lane marking that allows several modes of operation that are purported to reduce soldier workload and error. These models include manned operation, teleoperation with cruise control, and semi-autonomous path following. Path following is a GPS following mode that allows the Soldier to alter the lateral vehicle course in discrete control inputs known as biasing or bumping. The study was designed to examine these modes of operation comparing the subjective workload, stress, and motion sickness as well as course completion time, average speed, and driving error in terms of lateral drift. Soldiers were asked to operate the RMDS over a secondary course while maintaining proper speed and road edge following under all four conditions. Data for vehicle position and speed were collected at a rate of 5 Hz while subjective ratings of workload, stress, and motion sickness were collected at the mid-and end-points of the course runs. Participants were seven U.S. Army Soldiers and one Department of Defense civilian recruited from Ft. Belvoir, MD.

Robotic Research engineers were part of team that implemented semi-autonomy operation for “bumping” by human operators for the fine tuning of navigation for the unmanned vehicle.

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