The purpose of Project Stratus is to support the rapid construction of customizable robotic solutions. The Stratus system integrates innovations in robotic vision, navigation, and control systems to impact the development and deployment of robotics in society. The result of the design is a coherent framework that coordinates an array of collaborating system elements that collectively sense the surrounding environment and control physical movement. The project has the potential to impact developers seeking to create robotics solutions that benefit society.
The list of potential aerial and ground robotic systems in society is vast and growing. Some current areas of development include agriculture, transportation, product delivery, social and medical assistance, and service robots for personal and domestic use. The next stage of robotics in society will involve more common and commercial aspects including journalism, photography, real estate, delivery, and local governments, agriculture and others embrace drone technology. At the same time, there are many barriers to the use of robotics that range from Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations that restrict flight to commercial issues related to the insurance concerning autonomous cars. The foremost obstacle to large scale use of robotics in society is safety. While the first era of robotics was focused on developing inexpensive functional platforms, the next will focus on deploying easily controllable and autonomous solutions for a large number of unique problem domains.
While there are interesting visions for robotic applications in the commercial domain, Project Stratus is founded on the goal of empowering robot designers that explore applications in critically important domain of society. The purpose is to have society benefit the most by deploying robotic systems in areas that put men and women in potential danger, such as emergency response and safety scenarios. The above illustrates a broad spectrum of robotic roles in society in which people currently risk their lives helping others. Overall, the development of robotic solutions in these domains is hindered as design teams often must start from scratch when trying to meet the special requirements of their scenarios. For example, in emergency response cases, some common design goals are to provide fast-response and assistive services while for transportation safety systems, the goals are aligned for preventative actions predicted and determined from surveying. With the wide availability of rapid prototyping technologies coupled and the increasingly powerful yet inexpensive microprocessors, the general robotics field is at the frontier of a revolution of change. While such technologies play a critical role in building a robotic platform, the development time of a group to design, to test, and to deploy a solution platform in a specific domain area remains a fundamental problem.
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