Development of Multi-Actuated Ground Vehicles: Educational aspects

Controlling Minimally-Actuated Vehicles

Establishing a persistent presence in the ocean with an AUV to observe temporal variability of large-scale ocean processes requires a unique sensor platform. In this paper, we propose a strategy that utilizes ocean model predictions to increase the autonomy and control of Lagrangian or profiling floats for precisely this purpose. An A* planner is applied to a local controllability map generated...

Technology Development for Army Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Multi-Material Anisotropic Friction Wheels for Omnidirectional Ground Vehicles

In this paper, a novel omnidirectional vehicle with anisotropic friction wheels is presented. The proposed wheel has a series of bendable “nodes” on its circumference, each of which is made of two materials with differing friction properties: one material exhibits high friction, and the other exhibits low friction. The high friction section of the node generates a high traction force, while the...

Learning Multi-Modal Navigation for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

A robot that operates efficiently in a team with a human in an unstructured outdoor environment must be able to translate commands from a modality that is intuitive to its operator into actions. This capability is especially important as robots become ubiquitous and interact with untrained users. For this to happen, the robot must be able to perceive the world as humans do, so that the nuances ...

Real-Time, Multi-Perspective Perception for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

The most challenging technical problems facing successful autonomous UGV operation in off-road environments are reliable sensing and perception. In this paper, we describe our progress over the last year toward solving these problems in Phase II of DARPA’s PerceptOR program. We have developed a perception system that combines laser, camera, and proprioceptive sensing elements on both ground and...