John B. Carnett

USC RMP
Mapmaking on the fly

Many robots are born, bred, and buried in the lab, prototypes eternally protected from unfamiliar environments. That fate won’t befall the University of Southern California’s Segway Robotic Mobile Platform (RMP), a ’bot designed to quickly map unknown and rapidly changing areas such as urban battlefields. Computer scientist Gaurav Sukhatme and his students, including Jonathan Kelly, loaded a Segway platform with GPS, video cameras, laser range finders and wireless communications equipment. The range finders constantly measure the distance to nearby objects, forming a rough outline of the landscape. Software fills in the rest, referencing patterns from past experience to turn the outline into a useful map of walls, trees and buildings. A version of the robot could be used to make detailed 3-D maps of hotspots in Baghdad, but for now, it’s still in training around the USC campus.