Development of a standardized ground mobile platform for research and education
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Most unmanned surface vehicle designs are unique to the application and/or environment. This results in complex and expensive implementations which cannot be easily modified or expanded. The approach is not acceptable in an academic research or advance education environment where continued enhancements and modifications are the rule rather than the exception. Within academia, and other research development environments, there is a need for a low cost, "standardized" vehicle capable of supporting customization and adaptation to meet many divergent needs. Researchers at Texas A&M are interested in identifying a physical system (common platform) and hardware/software architecture (control system infrastructure) to address these needs. Working with industry partners, the first steps in this development effort are in progress. The SMP from Gears Educational Systems has been selected as the common platform. The hardware/software infrastructure of the vehicle will be based on the subsumption architecture developed in 1986 by R. Brooks and others. A subsumption architecture is a way of decomposing a complex behavior into "simple" modules. The Freescale Tower has been chosen as the basic building block for hardware/software development. Using a "slice-based" approach for the development, will allow for division of tasks by function, by hardware, and by software. This paper will present development efforts and preliminary results with lessons learned.
