An Autonomous Ground Vehicle for Distributed Surveillance: CyberScout

This paper describes the development of an autonomous robotic vehicle for tactical distributed surveillance under the CyberScout project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. The primary aim of the CyberScout project is to develop novel mobile and unattended ground sensor platforms that will extend the sphere of awareness and mobility of small military units. The research is focused on developing algorithms for multi-agent collaboration, efficient perception, sensor fusion, heterogeneous swarm technologies, distributed command and control, and task decomposition. The mobile robotic platforms within CyberScout range in size from microrobots (<5x5x5 cm) to All Terrain Vehicles (ATV). In this paper, the hardware system, control architecture, sensor suite, current capabilities, future research, and applications for the robotic ATV (CyberATV) are described.