Gudaitis, 22, an Ohio Northern University electrical engineering student, was part of an Air Force Research Laboratory demonstration meant to challenge college students to build and test robot sentries that could one day patrol military bases.
Instead of a base, teams from Ohio Northern in Ada and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland navigated the twin-tracked robots around bends and turns on an orange fence-lined obstacle course filled with simulated threats in a parking lot near the Wright Brothers Institute in Riverside.
“There are some pretty tight spots out there,” Gudaitis said.
What the students learn could be areas AFRL will study in the future to make robotic security patrols a real-world reality, according to James W. Poindexter, an AFRL materials and manufacturing technology senior research engineer.
“This specific competition was designed around the need for a robotic sentry that could patrol an isolated type of scenario — a missile silo, a forward operations base, an ammo depot, a typical kind of facility where it’s remote and there are often breaches in the security that require the Air Force or the Army to scramble people to go check out,” he said.
Potential security threats are a real concern for military bases like Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The sprawling Miami Valley base had a security lapse last November when a Beavercreek man who wasn’t authorized to be at Wright-Patterson drove past a gate entrance and gained entry into the AFRL Sensors Directorate, authorities have said. The breach caused an hours-long evacuation of employees and forced the closure of nearby roads. The man faces charges in federal court.
Along the obstacle course Friday, a large poster board with a drawing of a truck, a yellow and black hazardous waste sign on a trash container, and footprints in the snow were other simulated potential security lapses.
Ohio Northern’s robot, dubbed CAPie, or Computer-Aided Point inspection equipment, had a thermal-imaging camera on board along with the TV camera. The project was a “capstone” for graduating students like Gudaitis.
“This would be the first time they get to work with a robot,” said Srinivasa Vemuru, an Ohio Northern electrical and computer engineering professor. “This project is one where they are bringing all the different skills they have learned and put them together.”
The Case Western robot, dubbed BABS, or Bayesian Autonomous Broadcasting Sentry, used a laser light to measure distances to find its way. Electrical engineering major Rick Yuan, 21, used an Xbox joystick controller to remotely pilot the robot.
BABS banged into a curb, but reversed itself quickly and sped through the maze. “Other than that, I think it was pretty smooth sailing,” said Case Western team member Matt Dobrowsky, 21, a computer engineering student.
Yuan’s teammates looked through a TV camera on the robot to pick up something the laser light surveying technique, known as lidar, might have missed.
The laser light was faster than using a video camera to guide the driver, said Yuan, an electrical engineering student.
Each of the colleges, including Northeastern University in Boston, received $10,000 from AFRL to defray the cost of equipping the robot.
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