ABSTRACT
Autonomous reconnaissance missions are called for in extreme environments, as well as in potentially hazardous (e.g., the theatre, disaster-stricken areas, etc.) or inaccessible operational areas (e.g., planetary surfaces, space). Such future missions will require increasing degrees of operational autonomy, especially when following up on transient events. Operational autonomy encompasses: (1) Automatic characterization of operational areas from different vantages (i.e., spaceborne, airborne, surface, subsurface); (2) automatic sensor deployment and data gathering; (3) automatic feature extraction including anomaly detection and region-of-interest identification; (4) automatic target prediction and prioritization; (5) and subsequent automatic (re-)deployment and navigation of robotic agents. This talk will report on progress towards several aspects of an autonomous C4ISR robotic testbed at the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory (http://autonomy.arizona.edu), including: robotic agent development (ground, water-based), robotic behavior motifs as the building blocks for autonomous operations, and autonomous decision making based on a patented framework comprising sensor-data-fusion, unbiased anomaly detection, and target prioritization for follow-up investigations.