Speaking of saving amperage, consider some of the new warning light packages using light-emitting diode units. You can significantly reduce your amperage requirements compared to a halogen or strobe lighting package. Be prepared to pay more, but the payoff is that an LED will last for 100,000 hours - that''s the equivalent of more than 11 years of continuous operation.Power needsGenerators, too, have come a long way since the first light-duty rescue trucks were built. Built-in or portable generators still are an option, but the size, weight and cooling requirements should be considered in design and layout.

Today, the HVAC system components are spread throughout the engine compartment, exposing them to high heat and vibration. The automotive alternator and HVAC components are often among the top five product reliability issues cited for both construction equipment and on-highway trucks.The newly developed MorElectric HVAC module system combines all the HVAC components into a new module that uses an electrically powered, hermetically sealed compressor. "Packaging all the components together," Orr said, "also allows the use of rigid refrigerant tubing, and eliminates refrigerant permeation through the hoses. We expect to achieve a 5x improvement in reliability and a 3x improvement in durability over current air conditioning systems as used in trucks and construction equipment today." The HVAC module removes the condenser from the radiator area of the engine compartment, providing more physical space, as well as eliminating the air conditioning thermal load from the radiator air stream. Cat estimates its new modular HVAC also eliminates as many as 65 parts. Field service thus becomes a simple replacement function. The module can be swapped out in less than an hour, allowing customers to quickly get back up and running, and returned to revenue service.

In 1997, they put 2 men and 2 women in a 30-foot chamber for 91 days (Schreckenghost et al. 1998b). A physical-chemical air revitalization system recycled the air for 3 of the 4 people, and a wheat crop in the 10-foot chamber did the same for the fourth. The ALS team also experimented with a solid-waste incinerator. Our second ALS AI control system managed the transfer of O2 and CO2 among the gas reservoirs for this test to ensure crew and crop health and to recycle gases produced by waste incineration. These reservoirs included a crew habitat, a plant chamber, an airlock, and a number of pressurized tanks (figure 1). Operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the AI system also used a generative planner that scheduled waste incinerations and crop planting and harvesting, coordinating these tasks with the day-to-day product gas transfer. For both these projects, we used a three-layer architecture (Gat 1998) to design, organize, and develop the control software. AR&SD had used a particular implementation of this architecture known as 3T (see The 3T Intelligent Control System) in a number of robot projects prior to 1995 (Bonasso et al. 1997), and because life support systems are a form of immobots (Williams and Nayak 1996), its application to ALS projects was straightforward.

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