Marines to use autonomous vehicles built by Virginia Tech engineering students using TORC products

IMAGE: The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory worked closely with Virginia Tech and TORC in the creation of the four Ground Unmanned Support Surrogates (GUSS) that will be used for their ability...

Four unmanned autonomous vehicles designed and built by a team of engineering students at Virginia Tech using the TORC Robotic Building Blocks product line, are headed to Hawaii to participate in the 2010 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) war games in July.

Fourteen nations, 34 ships, five submarines, more than 100 aircraft, and 20,000 personnel will participate in the biennial RIMPAC exercise June 23 through Aug. 1.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory worked closely with Virginia Tech and TORC in the creation of the four Ground Unmanned Support Surrogates (GUSS) that will be used for their ability to support a platoon of U.S. Marines.

The unmanned vehicles can carry up to 1800 pounds and can move at the speed of a troop on foot, or about five miles per hour. The vehicles are designed to re-supply troops, to reduce the actual loads manually carried by Marines, and to provide an immediate means for the evacuation of any casualties in combat. A Marine unit will operate GUSS during the Naval Laboratory's enhanced company operations experimentation that coincides with RIMPAC.

Virginia Tech and TORC, a company founded by alumni of the university's robotics program, http://www.torctech.com/ share a very successful track record on their collaborations. Together, they developed autonomous vehicles for the Urban Challenge competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2006 and in 2007. "The focus of the collaborations is to leverage the research capabilities of the university with the commercialization capabilities of a small business," said Al Wicks, professor of mechanical engineering (ME) at Virginia Tech and faculty advisor to the team. http://www.me.vt.edu/people/faculty/wicks.html

They took home third place honors in 2007 when their vehicle completed DARPA's 60-mile course in less than six hours, with no human intervention allowed past the starting line.

The four GUSS vehicles headed to Hawaii are an outgrowth of the technology developed for these DARPA competitions, Wicks said. The sensors have been greatly improved, as well as the perception, planning, and control algorithms to navigate complex environments.

The Urban Challenge featured a cooperative environment with well-defined roads for the competition. When the GUSS vehicles are used by the Marine Corps in Hawaii, they will be "off-road and not in a cooperative environment," Wicks said. "This is a big step forward in autonomous vehicles."

Michael Fleming, a Virginia Tech ME graduate and the founder and chief executive officer of TORC, explained the team synergism, saying "I believe our team of government, academia, and industry all working together has provided the Marine Corps with a well-balanced solution."

As an example, existing algorithms developed by students under previous TORC/Virginia Tech partnerships, were used to create a customized version of the TORC AutonoNav (autonomous navigation system) product to provide the advanced off-road tactical behaviors required to meet the needs of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

The rapid development and experimentation on the GUSS project was made possible through the use of TORC's Robotic Building Blocks product line, said David Cutter, marketing manager at TORC. This enabled Virginia Tech engineers to leverage off-the-shelf technologies and focus on system integration challenges. The entire development process was completed in less than a year, with the first prototype delivered for testing in six months. The additional three vehicles were produced in the next five months to be shipped to the RIMPAC exercises.

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From ZIOPOST

GPS finds new crowd-control and medical applications By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
06/06/2010 06:44

A Hebrew University researcher has shown that GPS can control crowds or the movement of shoppers, and even evaluatE patient recovery after surgery. Global positioning systems (GPS) have become commonplace to help drivers reach their destinations using satellites. But a young Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher has shown that GPS can have other uses as well, such as controlling crowds or the movement of shoppers, and even evaluating patient recovery after surgery.

Michal Isaacson, a doctoral student working with Dr. Noam Shoval of HU’s geography department, has been involved in developing new approaches for the use of advanced tracking technologies. Her work has implications for understanding the activity of people in different settings, such as urban areas, shopping malls, theme parks, national parks and other tourist attractions. It has already been tested to evaluate crowd activity and flow at Spain’s Port Aventura theme park.   

For her research, Isaacson has been named the first-prize winner among students in this year’s competition for HU’s Kaye Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University.  The prizes will be presented on June 9 at the university’s Board of Governors meeting. Her work in this field has resulted in a book coauthored with Dr. Shoval and in several articles published in leading geographic journals. The first article she coauthored, published in The Professional Geographer, was noted by the journal as one of the top five most-cited articles in 2006 to 2007.

The system she and Shoval have developed uses GPS technology to record the location of people for a designated period of time. During this period, participants are required to carry a small GPS unit with them. The tracking data is then analyzed using a computerized, time/space analysis engine, to derive maps that indicate the volumes of activity throughout the location and charts that indicate how different types of populations spent their time in the location.

The data obtained using tracking technologies can also be analyzed in real time, creating virtual “radar” of the activity of visitors throughout a destination. Real-time analysis can lead to dynamic management of attractions in a more efficient way, both expanding the number of people that can visit an attraction within a given time frame and controlling their flow to promote sales. The analysis of this data can also change the way attractions are planned, and enable effective planning of future additions to an attraction.

The technology also has far-reaching medical applications, they say. In collaboration with Dr. Yair Barzilay of the HU-Hadassah Medical School and Hadassah University Medical Center’s orthopedic surgery unit, a method was developed for detecting the mobility of patientsafter surgery as an objective measure for their recovery and well-being. The patients carry a GPS unit with them after the operation, tracking their movements, which are then analyzed. Future development will integrate additional sensors that will allow the combination of GPS data with physiological data, such as heart rate and blood pressure.

The system was recently licensed through Yissum, HU’s technology transfer company, to Location Based Intelligence Inc., a US company, for further development and commercialization in the medical arena. Defining the potential market for this invention in the field of medical application is difficult at this stage, mainly because this product is creating a new market.

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