The objective of this research is to develop and integrate the perception, planning, and manipulation technologies necessary for autonomously detecting, uncovering, and retrieving fragile buried objects. Such technology has application in the retrieval of waste containers from landfills, recovery of munitions from shallow burial, exposure of cables beneath the ocean floor, and acquisition of extraterrestrial soil/rock samples. The proposed work will advance current knowledge in the fields of software architectures and reasoning systems for autonomous robots working with geomaterials, perception for building three- dimensional representations of buried objects, and manipulation for extricating objects from geo or diffuse material.
