Page 46 - GCN, Oct/Nov 2017

ROBOTICS, AUTOMATION & UNMANNED SYSTEMS
Finalist
Automating vital (but boring) back- office operations
Process Robotics
NASA Shared Services Center
Physical robots that can walk or roll are what tend to capture the public’s imagi- nation, but the humdrum processes in agency offices might offer the greatest potential for public-sector automation. And the NASA Shared Services Center is showing just how dramatically robotic process automation can improve service delivery.
The center has automated the creation of personnel cases in its human resourc- es system for new hires and position transfers within NASA. The bot receives an auto-generated email message when a new action is required and then copies personnel data and creates a new case
in the system to initiate subsequent processing actions.
What used to take 24 hours to make it through a human-processed queue now moves in an hour or less, with the center’s employees freed up for more complex HR tasks.
The project is the first in-production federal deployment of Process Robot- ics, a technology developed by Deloitte that automates computer-based tasks in the user interface layer and at the same security settings to minimize the impact on the underlying IT infrastructure.
NASA is also developing bots to auto- mate funds distribution and IT purchase requisitions, and the center’s officials hope to begin offering “robotics-as-a- service” to all NASA centers in 2018.
Mark Glorioso, the center’s execu- tive director, said accounting, HR and procurement processes, with their many checks and approvals, are particularly “well suited for execution by automated software.”
The new service aims to help all of NASA identify process automation op- portunities, develop the needed bots
and build a digital workforce that is efficient and cost-effective.
Finalist
Myriad missions for Murfreesboro drones
UAS Program Development
City of Murfreesboro, Tennessee
To get a better view of what’s happen- ing on the ground, officials in Murfrees- boro, Tenn., looked to the sky. With a goal of saving money on costly missions to take aerial photos for map updates every five years, Murfreesboro became the first city in the state to earn a Fed- eral Aviation Administration certificate of authorization to fly unmanned aircraft systems.
“Before this, when we needed aerial photography, we’d have to either work with a service that had a helicopter
or had airplanes,” said Chris Lilly, the city’s IT director. “Doing some research, we found that what normally takes us $400,000 [or] $500,000 to do every five years could maybe one day cost us around $75,000 if we did it with UAVs and UAS.”
The drones also have applications outside mapping. “As you get it and you start seeing the aerial footage, you realize the opportunities — the police department, they realized it — and start working together,” he added.
Other use cases include Fatal Ac- cident Crash Team investigations and rescue missions involving thermal imag- ery to search for lost individuals. The Fire and Rescue Department uses the system for training, and future applica- tions include city planning and disaster response.
“We’ve had those times when aerial photography would have helped us out when we were working with emergency management,” Lilly said. Officials need “the footage to [know] whether to de- clare an area a catastrophe.... So in our disaster contingency plans, we work in
the opportunity of using drones.”
Since the city launched its first drone — a Yuneec Q500 — in February, it has
added more systems: Yuneec hexacop- ters, a DJI Phantom 4 and a DJI Mavic. The city stores all the imagery from
its 50-plus flights so far on Microsoft’s cloud-based OneDrive.
Finalist
Sending robot squads into danger zones
Semi-Autonomous Top-Layer Technology
Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Army
As the number of unmanned vehicles available for military missions contin- ues to multiply, an obvious challenge arises: Who is going to control all those robots?
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency is addressing that need with a system that allows a single operator to control a semi-autonomous convoy of robot systems for intelligence, surveil- lance and reconnaissance missions.
The “top layer” solution creates a mesh communication network among the robotic vehicles, enabling the convoy
to instinctively follow its designated leader and providing a resilient commu- nications network that can function in urban and subterranean environments.
Real-time mapping becomes more effective, and the group of vehicles can adapt if some are destroyed or disabled. For the agency, such convoys bring obvious benefits when seeking to discover and dispose of explosives, possible weapons of mass destruction and other dangerous materials. But the technology, developed by Roboteam to be used with its various robot systems, has broader applications on the battle- field and in first responder situations.
46 GCN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 • GCN.COM