Planetary exploration scenarios illustrate the need for robots that are capable to operate in unknown environments without direct human interaction. Motivated by the DLR SpaceBot Cup 2015, where robots should explore a Mars-like environment, find and transport objects, take a soil sample, and perform assembly tasks, we developed autonomous capabilities for our mobile manipulation robot Momaro. ...

Omnidirectional vision sensors are very attractive for autonomous robots because they offer a rich source of environment information. The main challenge in using these for mobile robots is managing this wealth of information. A relatively recent approach is the use of fast wide baseline local features, which we developed and use in the novel sparse visual path following method described in this...

In this paper, the important formation control problem of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots is investigated via a leader-follower strategy. To this end, the dynamics model of the considered wheeled mobile robot is derived using Lagrange equations of motion. Then, using ADAMS multi-body simulation software, the obtained dynamics of the wheeled system in MATLAB software is verified. After that, ...

Omnidirectional vehicles have been developed and widely applied in several areas, but most of them are designed for the case of motion on flat, smooth terrain, and are not feasible for outdoor usage. This paper presents an omnidirectional mobile robot that possesses high mobility in rough terrain. The omnidirectional robot employs four sets of modules called active split offset caster (ASOC). T...

In this paper, we present an active visual SLAM approach for omnidirectional robots. The goal is to generate control commands that allow such a robot simultaneously localize itself and map unknown environment while maximizing the amount of information gained consuming as low energy possible. Leveraging robot’s independent translation rotation control, introduce multi-layered V-SLAM. top layer d...

We have developed omnidirectional vision systems by combining digital colour video cameras with conical and hyperbolic mirrors and applied it in mobile robots in indoor environments. A learning based approach is introduced for localising mobile robot mainly based on the vision data without relying on landmarks. In an off-line learning step the system is trained on the compressed input data so a...

Autonomous mobile robots are becoming more popular today and successfully integrated into many civil industrial projects. In the sectors flexibility modularity have an important role, so production can be diversified achieved with low costs. This paper presents conceptual functional design of a modular locomotion system for autonomous platform that configured according to needs environment it s...

This paper reports the new steps undertaken in our work aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of an omnidirectional vision sensor when conjugated with the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy. The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy was proposed by Benjamin Kuipers as a method for map building with robots. In our work, a robot builds a topological map of an unknown environment, using the Spatial Semantic Hierarc...

We present a method for trajectory generation for all-wheel steering mobile robots which can account for rough terrain and predictable vehicle dynamics and apply it to the problem of generating optimal motion splines. There has been little work in trajectory generation for vehicles with all-wheel steering capability compared to the Ackermann, differential-drive, or omnidirectional mobility syst...