Towards unmanned untethered work vehicles

The paper describes some issues in the future course of development of unmanned, untethered vehicles. The next generation of these untethered vehicles will have manipulators and imaging sensors and will be controlled by acoustic telemetry. The following generation will see more autonomous control of manipulation and more autonomy in low level manipulative task planning. The concept of impedance control is described and shown how it applies to autonomous manipulation. An energetic approach to task planning using the vehicle\´s sense of the environment is then presented and related to "connectionist" computer architectures. In both of these approaches, it is shown that, where there are redundant degrees of freedom, the environment tends to push the automatic system into a state of low energy.