Page 316 - Introduction to AI Robotics

8.2 Heterogeneity

a. 299

b.
Figure 8.2 Two views of a marsupial robot team at University of South Florida. a.)
Silver Bullet is the “mother” connected by an umbilical tether to a tracked chemical
inspection robot Bujold, the “daughter.” b.) Bujold exits from the rear of the jeep.
(Photographs by Tom Wagner.)

the daughter more easily in some situations by looking through the mother’s
camera.
At this time, there appear to be only two physically realized implemen-
tations of autonomous marsupials: the University of South Florida teams,
one of which is shown in Fig. 8.2, and the robots at the US Department of
3
Energy’s Idaho National Energy and Engineering Laboratory (INEEL). The
USF team is the only one where a mother robot carries a micro-rover inside
the structure to protect it. The Mars Pathfinder mission is similar to a mar-
supial robot in that a micro-rover was transported to a mission site and the
transport vehicle served as a support mechanism. However, our definition
of marsupial assumes the mother is a fully mobile agent and can recover and
retask the micro-rover.