Florida State University (FSU) researchers are working on complex instruction sets to let ground robots sense and react to their surroundings, which would allow them to operate more independently as opposed to being “waldos” that require remote control at all times. FSU Professor of Mechanical Engineering Emmanuel G. Collins is the director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, Control, and Robotics (CISCOR), which just has this research funded for eight years and a total of $4 million. DID’s June 2005 article “Battlefield Robots: to Iraq, and Beyond” explains some of the trends at work, and the USA’s $120+ billion Future Combat Systems program explicitly imagines armed land robots with some independent decision-making capability. DARPA’s Grand Challenge was one step along that road, Oshkosh’s steps toward unmanned trucks flowed from it, and this research may produce yet another step.
Roland Piquepaille’s Emerging Technology Trends blog has more details, including a link to a related technical paper called “Robot Navigation In Very Cluttered Environments By Preference-Based Fuzzy Behaviors” [PDF format, 23 pages, 461 KB].