Environmental exploration: an autonomous sensory systems approach

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate new paradigms in the analysis and design of virtual instrumentation in autonomous sensor systems. By autonomous sensor systems we mean mobile as well as immobile systems that employ a vast array of sensors to analyze or influence dynamic and uncertain external changes. These systems must perform operations in real time, in both expected and unexpected situations, using only limited human intervention. An autonomous sensor system can be used to collect data about a complex and dynamic environment, to perform interpretation and fusion of this data, and to present the resulting information to a human operator in a synthetic form that highlights features of interest of the environment. The system can then be regarded as a virtual instrument. A useful form to organize and present this information is a virtual spatial map-a representation of the environment in which colored geometric figures are placed to indicate that a given feature (or event) has been detected at that location. We illustrate our approach of building virtual instruments by presenting a case study of semi-autonomous remote environmental exploration. A mobile platform gathers information about a remote environment using multi-modal sensor data collection, information processing, and data fusion at different levels of abstraction and resolution. The result of the exploration is a fused virtual map that contains the important features of the environment.