The design of a team of collaborative mobile robots that can swiftly execute reconnaissance and sentry missions in hostile urban environments is a very complex enterprise. During the first phase of the Tactical Mobile Robotics Program (TMR), our research will be aimed at providing a number of robotic capabilities of intermediate complexity. We expect that such capabilities will be instanced and optimally combined in the integrated system of the System Demonstration Phase to provide high-level operational capabilities tailored to a given mission.

We will investigate planning, coordination, and execution techniques for accomplishing the following three tasks for robots operating inside buildings or outdoors in urban environments:

1. Map building
2. Target finding
3. Target tracking

We will not investigate perception and mobility capabilities per se. Instead, we intend to interact with other teams in order to develop realistic models of sensing and mobility and to define crucial representations (such of maps and mission plans) that will facilitate the concurrent development of our software modules with the those created by other researchers in the program, and their eventual integration into a single operational system.