The cheetah is capable of incredible feats of maneuverability [1] and these maneuvers generally involve rapid swinging of the animal’s lengthy tail. Very little is understood about the cheetah’s use of its tail and the common view is that it is “heavy” and possibly used as a “counter balance” or as a “rudder”. Ultimately, a deeper understanding of this specialized animal will inspire future hig...

My long-term goal is to contribute, by means of an accurate hydrodynamics model, to efficient design, development and operation of autonomous underwater vehicles in energetic shallow waters. From a scientific viewpoint, the development of the AUV hydrodynamic model will contribute to a better understanding of wave-body-current interactions, nonlinear shallow-water waves, wave effects on stabili...

In this work, a path planning strategy for both a car-like and a unicycle type assistive vehicles is presented. The assistive vehicles are confined to restricted environments. The path planning strategy uses the environment information to generate a kinematically plausible path to be followed by the vehicle. The environment information is provided by a SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mappin...