<title>Designing a behavior development environment to support the Demo III robotics program</title>

Abstract

One of the goals of the U.S. Army's Demo III robotics program is to develop individual and group behaviors that allow the robot to contribute to battlefield missions such as reconnaissance. Since experimental time on the actual robotic vehicle-referred to as the experimental unmanned ground vehicle (XUV) - is divided between many organizations, it is essential that we develop a simulation tool that will allow us to develop and test behaviors in simulation before porting them to the actual vehicle. In this work, we will describe a behavior development tool that incorporates robotic planning algorithms developed by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Modular Semi-Automated Forces (ModSAF) battlefield simulation tool. By combining the NIST planning algorithms with ModSAF, we can exercise the actual vehicle planning algorithms in a dynamic battlefield environment with a variety of entities and conditions to evaluate the behaviors we develop.