The Scout robot has been developed at the University of Minnesota in partnership with MTS, Honeywell, and ATC. The Scout is designed to operate alone or in conjunction with Scouts or other robots.

The Scouts are specialized robots that carry out low-level, usually parallel tasks aimed to meet the mission objectives. Scouts can include simple sensory units or units with locomotion, tools or other specializations. All Scouts have a similar form factor to enable delivery by a uniform mechanism of the ranger. The Scout has a body of roughly 11cm long, and 4cm in diameter (the special foam wheels can expand to 5cm in diameter). This body fits snugly inside a protective covering called a Sabot that absorbs much of the impact during the launch, and allows the Scout to even break through a glass window and land safely and ready to begin its mission.

Specifications

Variations

Currently, there are two different versions of the COTS Scouts. The first generation and second generation COTS Scouts are very similar in electronics and communication range. The second generation COTS Scouts were developed in an attempt to address some of the problems associated with building a robot that can withstand being thrown long distances. These new hardening features allow it to take multiple throws of > 50 feet and still function.

Demos

The COTS scout in action. (14MB mpeg)	The COTS Scout in a variety of use scenarios (60 MB WMV)
A narrated description of the COTS Scouts. (43MB mpeg)	A COTS Scout dropped from an RC Aircraft. (25MB mpeg)

Images

Publications

Ian Burt, Andrew Drenner, Casey Carlson, Apostolos D. Kottas, and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, "Impact Orientation Invariant Robot Design: An Approach to Projectile Deployed Robotic Platforms", Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Orlando, FL, May 2006.

Casey Carlson, Andrew Drenner, Ian Burt, Apostolos Kottas, Charles Hays, and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, "Rugged Robotic Reconnaissance System", Video proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Orlando, FL, May 2006.

Casey Carlson, Andrew Drenner, Ian Burt, Apostolos Kottas, Charles Hays, and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, "Rugged Mobile Robotic System", Poster Session of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Orlando, FL, May 2006.

Ben Jackson, Ian Burt, Bradley E. Kratochvil, and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos. "A Control System for Teams of Off-the-Shelf Scouts and MegaScouts", to appear, Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, Rhodes, Greece, June 2003.

Andrew Drenner, Ian Burt, Derek Goerke, Bradley E. Kratochvil, Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos. "COTS Scout Robot", To Appear in Video proceedings of the SPIE International Symposium on Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology V, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A., April 2003.

Bradley E. Kratochvil, Ian T. Burt, Andrew Drenner, Derek Goerke, Bennett Jackson, Colin McMillen, Christopher Olson, Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, Adam Pfeifer, Sascha A. Stoeter, Kristen Stubbs, David Waletzko. "Heterogeneous Implementation of an Adaptive Robotic Sensing Team." Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2003.