Modular Interface Framework for Advanced Soldier-Platform Interoperability

Abstract

The U.S Military and other foreign Armed Forces have been slowly embracing the use of robotic systems in combat operations, enabling them to mitigate unnecessary risks for dismounted soldiers. As technologies continue to improve, semi-autonomous platforms can carry out complicated tasks and keep Warfighters out of harm’s way. Nevertheless, no matter how good the technology is, it remains susceptible to failure or encountering situations that it does not know how to handle. This means that soldiers must be prepared to assist or take over the robotic systems at a moment’s notice. To ensure that Combat Engineers can smoothly transition between active and supporting roles throughout the mission, robotic platforms must have robust user interfaces that adjust to the soldiers’ needs. To address this gap, we introduce a framework that allows a user to take full control of a Robot Operating System (ROS) based platform utilizing interfaces such as wearable devices, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and traditional workstations. With this framework, users may gather situational information, execute autonomous routines or tele-operate a ROS-based platform from any device that has access to the robot’s network. We present three user interfaces to demonstrate the use of our framework and discuss its impact to the role of Combat Engineers and robotic platforms in future operations. These user interfaces include a military tactical mobile application, a simulated workstation in virtual reality, and a smartwatch application.