We attended the Second Quarterly IPR meeting in Denver from January 11-15, 1999 and presented a report on the milestones we have achieved in our TMR project. We have sent a copy of our presentation to Joe Urda and George Pappas by email on February 3, 1999. We have discussed in detail the comments and suggestions we received from the Army during the IPR meeting and have been sharpening our project focus based on this feedback.

With the purchase of a Sick laser ranging sensor and a Dell laptop, we have assembled all the major pieces of equipment we need and have actively started performing experiments on our robots. We are currently engaged in developing a robust software base on the robots on which we will implement and test all our algorithms for map building, target finding, and target tracking.

Looking ahead to the Third Quarterly IPR meeting to be held in May 1999, we are refining our next-best view technique for building two-dimensional maps to handle larger uncertainties in robot positions. With this refinement, we plan to run the next-best view algorithm on one of the Nomad SuperScouts we have purchased under the TMR project.

Another problem we are focussing on is extending our target-finding planner to the case when the sensors on the robots have limited visibility. We have already achieved promising results when visibility is restricted to a cone (e.g., when a camera is mounted on the robot). We are now extending this technique to handle sensors that cannot "see" the environment beyond a certain range.

We are also continuing to develop our target-tracking algorithms. To ensure that multiple robots can track multiple targets, we exploit the model of the environment constructed in the map-building phase to model the behaviour of the target. The idea is that the targets being tracked will try to hide from the robots but we can use the current positions of the robots and targets in the map to predict where the targets are likely to hide.