Experimental results relating to the steering control system of an experimental autonomous vehicle operating in a pre-defined and structured environment are presented. A method of steering control is formulated which relates second-order criteria, such as rise time and damping factor, to the parameters of the control system. With the control system described, the vehicle can track a path of con...

In this paper we propose a computationally efficient method for the steering of flexible needles with a bevel tip in the presence of uncertainties for the case when there are no obstacles in the environment. Based on the stochastic model for the needles, we develop a new framework for path planning of a flexible needle with a bevel tip. This consists of three parts: (a) approximation of probabi...

Cardiac ablation therapy is an effective minimally invasive treatment for cardiac arrhythmia. Catheter steering in the constrained environment during the procedure is considered difficult, particularly in providing accurate catheter tip positioning for ablating or for diagnosing the cardiac tissue. These difficulties and inaccuracies in the catheter tip positioning are a common reason for sever...

In ultrasonic medical imaging, spatial compounding of images is a technique where ultrasonic beam is steered to examine patient tissues in multiple angles. In the conventional ultrasonic diagnostic imaging, the steering of the ultrasonic beam is achieved electronically using the phased array transducer elements. In this paper, a spatial compounding approach is presented where the ultrasonic pro...

There are a variety of factors affecting steering performance on off-road vehicles, including vehicle dynamics and soil stiffness. It is essential to understand the steering dynamics for designing a reasonable electrohydraulic (E/H) steering control system for wheel-type tractor. A computer-controlled E/H steering simulator, consisting of a steering actuator and a steering load simulator, is an...

The MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) estimator has been widely studied for a long time for its high resolution capabilities in the domain of the directional of arrival (DOA) estimation, with the sources assumed to be point. However, when the actual sources are spatially distributed with angular dispersion, the performance of the conventional MUSIC is degraded. This paper deals with the se...

This paper addresses the path-following problem of steering an autonomous airplane along a predefined 3-D path, while performing a coordinated turn maneuver. The presented solution relies on the definition of a path-dependent error space to express the dynamic model of the vehicle, and of an output tracking error that guarantees both path-following and coordinated turn compliance. For controlle...

In the paper Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) models of a road-vehicle are presented, that describe the yaw dynamics, the steering system and the brake dynamics of the front wheels. The scheduling parameter is the vehicle velocity. The identification procedure is also detailed. The aim of the identification is to provide models for LPV yaw-rate controller design. The differential brake control on...

BACKGROUND Intracerebral drug delivery using surgically placed microcatheters is a growing area of interest for potential treatment of a wide variety of neurological diseases, including tumors, neurodegenerative disorders, trauma, epilepsy, and stroke. Current catheter placement techniques are limited to straight trajectories. The development of an inexpensive system for flexible percutaneous i...

Many advanced robotic systems are subject to nonholonomic constraints, e.g., wheeled mobile robots, space manipulators and multifingered robot hands. Steering these mechanisms between configurations in the presence of perturbations is a difficult problem. In fact, the divide et impera strategy (first plan a trajectory, then track it by feedback) has a fundamental drawback in this case: due to t...