Test results of autonomous behaviors for urban environment exploration

Under various collaborative efforts with other government labs, private industry, and academia, SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) is developing and testing advanced autonomous behaviors for navigation, mapping, and exploration in various indoor and outdoor settings. As part of the Urban Environment Exploration project, SSC Pacific is maturing those technologies and sensor payload configurations that enable man-portable robots to effectively operate within the challenging conditions of urban environments. For example, additional means to augment GPS is needed when operating in and around urban structures. A MOUT site at Camp Pendleton was selected as the test bed because of its variety in building characteristics, paved/unpaved roads, and rough terrain. Metrics are collected based on the overall system's ability to explore different coverage areas, as well as the performance of the individual component behaviors such as localization and mapping. The behaviors have been developed to be portable and independent of one another, and have been integrated under a generic behavior architecture called the Autonomous Capability Suite. This paper describes the tested behaviors, sensors, and behavior architecture, the variables of the test environment, and the performance results collected so far.