Monthly Highlights 2003

August 2003

This summer marked the second time that ISD has deployed the NIST Reference Test Arenas for Autonomous Mobile Robots for the International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Conference and the fourth consecutive year for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference's Robot Rescue Competition (IJCAI joins the AAAI and other AI conferences into a single event every other year, while AAAI occurs by itself during the off-years). This year's competition, held in Acapulco, Mexico, featured six teams from Canada and the United States competing in the three-day event. In their capacity as co-chairs, Adam Jacoff and Brian Weiss led the enhancement of the rules and other pertinent documents, as well as organized and administered the event. Teams from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and Swarthmore from Pennsylvania placed 1st and 2nd, respectively. The University of New Orleans received a Technical Award for Inspired Interfaces. The teams that competed in prior years showed enhancements in perception, knowledge representation, mobility, sensing, collaboration, and autonomy versus last year. Preparations are already underway for next year's AAAI conference in San Jose, California. ISD personnel will continue to be actively involved in all facets of the upcoming event.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov or Elena Messina, elena.messina@nist.gov

July 2003

For the second consecutive year, ISD personnel have attended the international RoboCup competition and co-chaired the RoboCupRescue - Real Rescue League. The purpose of the event is bring researchers from world-wide academia and industry together to display, share, and evaluate their technologies in the field of urban search and rescue robotics. This year's competition took place in Padua, Italy with the Italians, Adam Jacoff and Brian Weiss working together to fabricate and assemble local versions of the NIST Reference Test Arenas for Autonomous Mobile Robots, that served as the competition field. ISD personnel also organized and ran the competition while maintaining and administering the arenas between rounds. Overall, the Italian arenas and the competition were successful as 12 teams ranging from Italy, Japan, Germany, Iran, USA, Netherlands, Canada, and the Czech Republic participated in a much-anticipated event.

Following the competition, the Italian arenas are being housed at a research facility in Rome to allow further research and testing. Plans for the RoboCupRescue - Real Rescue League competition at the RoboCup2004 in Lisbon, Portugal have already begun. The Portuguese will follow the lead of the Italians and construct their own version of the NIST Standard Reference Test Arenas for Autonomous Mobile Robots under the guidance of NIST personnel. Discussions are also underway to augment the German Open with an Orange Arena to host their own Real Rescue League. It is anticipated that next year's competition will see greatly improved robotic implementations that should enhance the state-of-the-art in the field.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov or Elena Messina, elena.messina@nist.gov

June 2003

The Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers (SICE) announced their selection of Adam Jacoff to receive the RoboCupRescue Robot League SICE International Award for "Contributions to the advancement of rescue engineering by design and fabrication of the standard robot test fields of RoboCupRescue." The award is to be presented at the closing ceremony of RoboCup 2003 in Padua, Italy in July. The RoboCupRescue League conducts competitions of search and rescue robots and aims to advance the capabilities of these robots by:

	Objectively evaluating mobile robots in a challenging and realistic environment
	Developing performance metrics and standards for mobile robots
	Fostering collaboration among robotic researchers

The Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers is an organization of major Japanese robot, car, and other manufacturers.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov

May 2003

An article headlined "Search-Rescue Robots Test Their Mettle in Tournaments" prominently featured NIST work to develop and deploy reference test arenas for urban search and rescue (USAR) robots:

…Ten years ago, no one had tried to use robots for search and rescue, but by 2001 researchers had enough expertise to deploy robotic vehicles with some success to search through rubble at the World Trade Center and the damaged buildings around it. Now, robots compete annually in two international search-and-rescue tournaments, measuring their progress in diabolically difficult arenas designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…

Washington Post reporter Guy Gugliotta visited the USAR arenas at the NIST Nike site May 15 for an extensive tour and interviews with NIST staff and Mitre researchers, who had brought several robots to the facility for testing. NIST researcher Adam Jacoff is quoted several times in the article, which may be read in full at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55684-2003May29.html. The NIST USAR work is also featured in a recent article appearing in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030428roborescuescip3.asp.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov

April 2003

The AIAG Metrology Interoperability Project Team (MIPT) presented an important set of usable metrology system interface specifications at the Quality Expo on April 16, 2003 in Chicago, IL. Over fifty key individuals in the metrology community attended this presentation. It was the culmination of over three years of work by many individuals and NIST ISD played a variety of critical and essential roles in the facilitation of this milestone event. At the same meeting, John Horst of NIST ISD presented the case for conformance and interoperability testing as the MIPT moves into a testing and implementation phase in the life of the work of the MIPT. He presented test suite development status and reported on the status of implementation development team efforts on each of the interfaces in the MIPT purview.

Contact: John Horst, john.horst@nist.gov

Beginning in December 2002 and continuing through April 2003, personnel from the Intelligent Systems Division, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, and the Information Technology Laboratory conducted a Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL6) assessment for an Army autonomous mobility program. This effort was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and used Experimental Unmanned Vehicles (XUVs) developed by General Dynamics Robotic Systems among others.

Three similar assessment exercises were conducted in arid, rolling/vegetated, and urban environments, requiring the collaboration of almost sixty personnel. The test vehicles were provided with GPS waypoints of almost 700 discreet missions, ranging from 500m to 2000m in length, totalling over 500km of autonomous travel. The types of performance data captured after each mission included vehicle log files, operator control unit log files, handwritten observer log sheets, and several streams of video to capture vehicle performance, operator workload, and operator interface screens.

After the XUVs completed their missions, ISD personnel used our advanced sensors and instrumented HMMWV to capture a series of terrain characterization scans in an effort to quantify the terrain difficulty of each course. These scans included both fine resolution LADAR, course resolution LADAR, and color images, all correlated to differential GPS positions. These scans have since been post processed and pieced together to form a continuous data map of the terrain allowing further study of vehicle paths and specific terrain features.

This data collection effort has produced an enormous archive of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) data which will be administered by ISD and made available to researchers interested in solving the pertinent problems involved in autonomous mobility of ground vehicles.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov

March 2003

Jim Gilsinn demonstrated a set of industrial Ethernet performance tests at the Open DeviceNet Vendors Association (ODVA) EtherNet/IP Plug Fest on March 22-23, 2003 at the GM Technology Center in Warren, MI. The plug fest was designed to test the EtherNet/IP standard in a multi-vendor environment. Sixteen different vendors brought nineteen different products to the plug fest, with over 40 technical people attending the event. March 22nd was setup for one-on-one testing with each of the vendor's products. While this was taking place, Jim Gilsinn demonstrated the performance tests and initial results to interested people. Representatives from GM had discussions with Jim about the performance tests and would like to follow-up with NIST on the research. Also, the initial data taken showed some interesting results that representatives from Rockwell Automation would like to inspect more closely.

All the vendor's products were attached to one single network on March 23rd. This gave the vendors the opportunity to find problems with their systems when working in a "production" environment. During these vendor experiments, Jim Gilsinn captured large amounts of data on the performance of those products. Twenty-six data sets were captured, consisting of 6500 points each, totaling over 120 Mbytes. The second half of the day was intended for Jim to test the performance of the "production" network under network load. Multiple tests were conducted at different network loads, all resulting in the devices having difficulty. Further experiments will have to be conducted to get more detailed numbers on the performance aspects of network load on EtherNet/IP devices.

The performance tests developed here in ISD were well received by people at the plug fest. At least 10 people sat down with Jim during the two-day period and discussed the tests in detail. The results of the plug fest were also successful. Most of the vendors learned something new about their products, and many of them expressed an interest in having another plug fest in the future.

Contact: Jim Gilsinn, james.gilsinn@nist.gov

February 2003

Roger Bostelman set-up a booth at ProMat 03 in Chicago Feb. 9-13. The booth, which included Industrial Autonomous Vehicle (IAV), Ladar, and RoboCrane posters and videos and demonstration of low-cost range imaging technology, was very successful. Several AGV companies expressed interest in range imaging cameras and two companies inquired about integrating this technology into their vehicles as an addition or replacement to the single line scan Ladar devices currently used. Many people were interested in the Ladar poster and display, and were excited about the prospect that the decreasing cost of this technology will soon make it appropriate for use in industrial material handling systems. Roger will follow up with the approximately 30 people who asked to receive additional information.

Contact: Roger Bostelman, roger.bostelman@nist.gov

January 2003

A paper by Adam Jacoff, Elena Messina, and John Evans entitled, "Performance Evaluation of Autonomous Mobile Robots," that appeared in the Journal Industrial Robot 29:3, May 2002, was awarded the most Outstanding Paper in the 2002 volume for that journal. The paper describes NIST's work to create reference test arenas for mobile autonomous robots.

Contact: Adam Jacoff, adam.jacoff@nist.gov

Monthly Highlights for 2002

Monthly Highlights for 2001

Monthly Highlights for 2000

Monthly Highlights for 1999

Date created: 1/25/2001
Last updated: 10/06/2003