My name is Nicola Bezzo.
I'm a faculty in system engineering.
And this is my lab, the autonomous mobile robots
lab at UVA.
Our work focuses on creating [INAUDIBLE]
resilient autonomous systems that can occur from mistakes
and even cyberattacks.
One of our research areas is marketing.
We are now sending one of our robots, the Jackal, underground
to map the Blue Ridge Tunnel.
With this historic tunnel, now abandoned,
rocks are falling from the ceiling.
There is water dripping.
The ground is uneven.
The Jackal is moving on its own, working autonomously
to probe space.
As it's moving, it's collecting point cloud data
to stitch together and create a 3D
reconstruction of the tunnel.
This kind of the autonomous robot
will be more and more deployed in environments that are
very unsafe to human beings.
These robots are operating at the edges of new possibilities,
creating a future whose outlines are beginning to emerge as we
create a map of what's next.