NRI: INT: COLLAB: Co-Robotic Systems for GeoSciences Field Research

沙尘暴是一个日益严重的全球性威胁，土壤不稳定和侵蚀威胁农业，细泥沙损害河流和海洋的生态系统健康，所有这些都影响到几乎每个大陆的大量人口。这些干扰环境的累积影响还通过破坏居住和破坏交通而威胁人类福祉。地球科学，认知科学和机器人研究人员的跨学科合作旨在通过赋予腿式机器人敏捷，新手现场助理的仪器和科学议程，加速和深化与这种不稳定土壤相关的流体和材料特性的数据收集。这些新机器人能够进行一般的野外移动，并被编程为像助理野外地质学家一样思考，以便在缺乏测量的崎岖自然环境中制定研究策略。克服这些环境所带来的特定运动挑战，开发足以解释和满足人类研究需求的算法和软件，将极大地推动机器人领域的发展。由此产生的关于风、水和物质过程的新信息将对基础设施和农业的管理以及景观对环境变化的响应产生影响。该项目的重点是使用地球科学实地研究环境来测试一系列假设，从科学知识的正式表示到人机追求科学数据的可证明正确的算法的属性。地球科学的目标是产生第一个全面的，随时间变化的地图，土壤强度与协同定位土壤水分成分和大小在降雨过程中的自然景观。认知科学的目标是开发一种形式化的表示的认知过程的基础领域的数据收集和解释，同时适合于基础机器人现场援助算法，而在同一时间推进人类感知插值和推理的研究。机器人技术的目标是实现一个可证明的正确架构，从正式的人类任务规范中生成一系列安全，稳定的在线自动腿步态过渡复杂的破碎地形，满足地球科学家的数据收集目标。两个不同的腿式机器人家庭与各种感知和地球科学仪器套件将部署在自然山坡上的调查下，由人类地球科学家。将根据评估机器人机动性和自主性程度、所产生的地球科学测量结果的质量和可靠性以及收集过程对采样环境的影响的标准，对所产生的人类-机器人小组的实地表现进行评价。腿式机器人力学和智能控制的进步已经将该领域带到了一个门槛，在这个门槛上，自主移动的下一个主要挑战只能针对与非结构化环境相关的抽象但正式的任务套件来制定和参与，目标导向的运动行为可以被精确地测量。机器人甚至被赋予了理解科学家何时何地需要什么测量的初步知识，为了验证他们的假设，将加深我们对人类认知结构的了解。它们还将为在目前无可挑剔的时空尺度上收集大量数据开辟道路，有可能改变地球科学的理论和经验基础。

Sand and dust storms are a growing worldwide menace, soil instability and erosion threatens agriculture, and fine sediment compromises ecosystem health of rivers and oceans, all impacting large human populations on nearly every continent. The cumulative effects of these disturbed environments also threaten human well-being through damage of habitation and disruption of transportation. An interdisciplinary collaboration of geoscience, cognitive science, and robotics researchers aims to accelerate and deepen the collection of data about the fluid and materials properties associated with such unstable soils by endowing legged robots with the instrumentation and scientific agenda of agile, novice field assistants. These new robots are capable of general field mobility and are being programmed to think like assistant field geologists in order to develop research strategies in rugged natural environments where measurements are lacking. Overcoming the specific locomotion challenges presented by these environments and developing algorithms and software sufficient to interpret and act on human research needs will greatly advance the field of robotics. The resulting new information about wind, water and materials processes will have bearing on the management of infrastructure and agriculture, and also the response of landscapes to environmental changes.The project focus is to use the geosciences field research setting to test a chain of hypotheses reaching from the formal representation of scientific knowledge to the properties of provably correct algorithms for human-machine pursuit of scientific data. The geoscientific goal is to produce the first comprehensive, time varying maps of soil strength with co-located soil moisture composition and size over the course of rainfall events in a natural landscape. The cognitive science goal is to develop a formalized representation of the cognitive processes underlying field data collection and interpretation that is simultaneously suitable to underlie robotic field assistance algorithms while at the same time advancing the study of human perceptual interpolation and reasoning. The robotics goal is to achieve a provably correct architecture for generating from formalized human task specification a chain of safe, stable online automated legged gait transitions on complex broken terrain that subserve the geoscientist data collection objectives. Two different families of legged robots with a variety of perceptual and geoscientific instrumentation suites will be deployed over natural hillsides under investigation by human geoscientists. Field performance of the resulting human-robot teams will be evaluated according to criteria assessing the degree of robotic mobility and autonomy, the quality and reliability of the resulting geoscientific measurements, and the impact of the collection process on the sampled environment. Advances in legged robot mechanics and intelligent control have brought the field to a threshold where the next major challenges for autonomous mobility can only be formulated and engaged with respect to suites of abstract but formal tasks relative to unstructured environments against which the appropriateness and success of autonomously generated, goal-directed motor behaviors can be precisely measured.Robots endowed with even the rudiments of understanding what measurements are needed where and when by scientists, in order to test their hypotheses, would deepen our insight into the structure of human cognition. They would also open the way toward collecting massive amounts of data at presently unachievably fine spatiotemporal scales, potentially transforming the theoretical and empirical foundations of geoscience.