Design, control, and simulation of marsupial systems for extending operational lifetime

The development of large scale marsupial robotic teams has been prohibitive for a number of reasons. The complexity of such systems has been hard to simulate, especially in the case of a 'Many-to-One' relationship between a marsupial robot and the robots it can deploy. Additionally, the construction of physical systems can be expensive to implement and maintain. However, there are a number of scenarios in which large scale distributed teams are advantageous such as urban search and rescue, biological or chemical release monitoring, or distributed surveillance and reconnaissance. Distributed robotic teams that make use of marsupial systems are able to leverage the power, computational, and locomotive capabilities of a larger system to transport, coordinate, and control smaller robots which may carry more specialized sensing capabilities into areas that are spatially restrictive. As a result, it is necessary to pursue research into this area in order to improve robotic response capabilities. This work looks at the development of a simulation environment capable of modeling multiple 'Many-to-One' marsupial systems and the relationship between this simulation environment and a prototype marsupial system presently under construction. Simulated experiments will be used to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed system to enable extended duration missions that would not have previously been possible.