当一个士兵旅行在一块岩石上,他照片ks himself up, dusts himself off, and presses on. Bomb-defusing robots, for the moment, are not so good at recovering themselves in the same way.
Chad Kessens, a robot manipulation research engineer with the Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, part of the Research, Development and Engineering Command, on Aberdeen Proving Ground, or APG, Maryland, is working to make it so the autonomous vehicles used by Soldiers to investigate the inside of a room, or to defuse an improvised explosive device, can turn themselves back over, right side up, if they ever get flipped the wrong way.
在APG的实验室，Kessens有一个简易爆炸装置 - 或IED，坐在一块胶合板上的诽谤机器人略微在一个边缘上略微屈服，以创造倾斜。他把机器人翻了一遍。附近的研究人员启动了机器人的一系列说明，并且在几秒钟内，机器已经直立翻转。
His research, he said, will mean less time manipulating the sometimes complex controls of an autonomous vehicle to make it right itself, and fewer situations where a Soldier has to make the tough decision to either leave a robot behind or go into what may be a dangerous area to retrieve it.
Kessens说,他开始了他的工作后attended the Army’s Route Reconnaissance and Clearance Course.
“Soldiers take it to learn to use robots for finding improvised explosive devices by the roadside in theater,” he said. “Through my interactions with the Soldiers and the trainers, who had been in theater using these robots, I learned that these robots turn over surprisingly often. And when they do, it can be difficult for the Soldier to return it to its upright state and continue the mission.”
One Soldier, he said, relayed to him a story about exactly the kind of scenario that would demand a robot perform on its own what now requires the intervention of an operator. An autonomous robot had flipped over, and the Soldier found himself spending an inordinate amount of time manipulating the controls trying to recover it.
“经过20分钟的尝试后，他不能这样做，”Kessens说。“他非常重视他的机器人，以至于他摆脱了车辆的安全并越过了机器人。这正是我们不想把士兵放在的那种情况。“
When Kessens returned home, he looked into the scientific literature on what has been already done with self-righting robots.
“我发现了几种解决方案，每个解决方案对于特定机器人，”他说。“但是陆军有几种类型的系统，新系统将出现。我希望能够为任何机器人制定一个自右行解决方案的一般框架。包括跟踪的机器人，腿机器人，飞行机器人，以及没有很多内存或处理能力的非常小的机器人。我的作品旨在开发一个可以应用于任何机器人的框架。你给我一个机器人，我为机器人提供了一个自我拨导的解决方案，假设它是可以的。“
Kessens said that many times when a robot flips over in an operational environment, the user – the Soldier – can’t see the robot, so he has no way of knowing what way the robot is actually sitting on the ground.
“It can be really disorienting when the robot flips over and the camera is staring straight at the sky or the ground, and the operator might not have a good idea of how the robot is configured, which could make it challenging to make the robot return to its upright state,” Kessens said.
So Kessens has developed software that, when coupled with information about how a specific robot is designed, generates a set of instructions the robot can use to flip itself back upright.
The software Kessens has designed does not run on the robot. Rather, the software runs on a separate computer, and develops an array of solutions the robot can use to flip itself upright, based on what orientation it might find itself in. Those solutions are then loaded into the robot, and it takes that set of instructions with it wherever it goes.
“One of the nice things about the framework I’ve been developing is that it takes pre-processed plans and distills them down to something that doesn’t take much memory or processing power,” he said. “It runs before the robot ever hits the field.”
最小的机器人可能没有在加工电源上进行处理，以便在飞行中计算自己的自我拨导解决方案。但随着Kessens的想法，即使是存储器和处理能力有限的小型机器人也可以与他们一起携带一套已经开发的自纠正解决方案，以便在游戏中回到游戏中。
When a robot flips over, then it can assess its orientation, reference the set of instructions it has for that particular situation, and then use its own flippers, wheels or arms to turn itself upright again and get on with its mission.
Kessens的工作是相当数学的。他的软件意味着为任何机器人开发解决方案。但要做到这一点，他首先需要提供有关机器人的特定信息。他需要考虑机器人的尺寸和重量，它具有多少臂，其轮子和脚蹼，以及如何在机器人上分发质量。If it has a mechanical arm, the software must know how long each segment of that arm is, how much the arm weighs, and if the weight of the arm is at the base, near the robot’s body, or if it is at the end of the arm.
他说，每个在特定机器人上移动部分都可能以帮助机器人自身的方式移动或操纵。
On a robot with an arm, for instance, moving that arm in one direction could create the momentum needed to flip it back over. But that only works if there is enough weight on the end of that arm, if the arm is of the right length, and if the arm is moved quickly enough – and stopped quickly enough.
“如果我使用动态运动，我会迅速放弃质量，然后让它突然停止，现在我们注入了系统的势头，我们可以使用动力来使机器人成为自身，”他说。“这是一个总物理问题。”
在“自治系统师”和ARL中，Kessens表示，研究人员正致力于“将工具转换为队友”。
“We want to take these robots and give them enough autonomy that they act more like a well-trained dog, where the Soldier can send the robot on a mission where it operates on its own for a couple of minutes, where the Soldier doesn’t have to manage every joint motion and every single activity that the robot is doing,” he said.
If robots can be provided with a “higher level of cognitive ability,” he said, then instead of multiple Soldiers needing to deploy and operate and retrieve robots, “maybe we can flip that ratio and have one Soldier command four robots, where each of those robots is doing something, and it acts more like a teammate.”
Kessens said that kind of relationship between a team of Soldiers and the tools they use is “a ways down the line. But self-righting is one technology that is a part of that, one step toward that vision. We want to give Soldiers a robot that has more self-reliance.”
提起：M2M（机器到机器）
