Development of an unmanned terrestrial mobile robot with enhanced situational awareness.

Un-manned systems have rapidly increased both in number and versatility. Their missions can now range from surveillance to bomb disposal and Urban Search and Rescue. This has opened up an unprecedented number of venues for research; and now, the research is not only limited to proof of concept, but has advanced to improving the systems. The earlier versions of such robots that were put into the field faced a host of problems, one of which was of situational awareness of the robot operator. This problem not only limited the utility of the robots but also at times became dangerous for the user himself. In this paper we discuss the development of a generic terrestrial mobile robot along with the integration and development of some techniques to improve situational awareness for the robot operator.