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Home: News and Info It’s almost as tall as an average person, and its head is a single “eye” in the form of a digital camera. Its heart is an open book—a laptop with the screen up—and it moves around autonomously on a base with two sturdy tires. It’s a robotic Segway, and right now it can follow cars, strolling people, and pets. But faculty and student researchers in the UMass Amherst Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics (LPR) are creating control software that they hope will one day enable the free-wheeling Segway to help transport injured persons out of disaster sites and assist astronauts in planetary exploration. The robotic Segway is an autonomous version of the Segway Human Transporter (HT) called the Segway Robotic Mobility Platform (RMP). The Segway HT is the two-wheeled platform on which a person stands and moves up to 12 miles per hour by shifting his or her weight. Segway has collaborated with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create an autonomous platform that can be driven by a computer, instead of a human. On the platform are sensors and computers that the Segway RMP automatically balances using rate gyros to measure the attitude of the platform. The UMass Amherst LPR research on the Segway RMP is funded by a grant to Computer Science Professor Rod Grupen from DARPA, and the Segway RMP is on loan to the department for a year for testing and development of advanced control software. The UMass Amherst team is one of a dozen in the country working with the modified Segways to develop a high-performance, human-scale mobile platform that can collaborate with humans to reduce their exposure to hazardous environments, follow them and carry heavy loads, or carry sensors that boost a human's perception. The platform currently has a camera and laser range finder mounted on the Segway to follow a human leader while avoiding obstacles. Student and faculty researchers have demonstrated outdoor follow-the-leader tasks at speeds previously unattainable with commercially available mobile robots. Oliver Brock, assistant professor of computer science and a member of the research team, says, "Our Segway is capable of a number of skills necessary in order to transport injured people autonomously: avoiding obstacles, detecting impassable terrain, finding new routes, and following leaders." Andrew Fagg, senior research scientist in computer science and another member of the team, says the goal is to develop a versatile autonomous platform that can be used in a variety of applications. "We are working to extend these techniques to allow the robots to automatically perform search-and-rescue tasks with limited human interaction. This will allow many robots to be used to find survivors in damaged buildings, giving human rescuers a good sense of where help is needed and where the hazards are even before they enter." The UMass Amherst team hopes ultimately to mount arms and hands on the platform to allow the robot to perform tasks shoulder-to-shoulder with other robots and humans. more: UMass Research Infrastructure: story by Deborah Klenotic posted March 26, 2004
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