This document is a progress report for the second year of the research project “Sensor Data Integrity and Mitigation of Perceptual Failures”, sponsored by the AFOSR/AOARD under agreement number FA2386-10-1-4153. The objective of this research is to better understand and promote integrity and dependability of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), with a focus on their perceptual systems. This will pr...

A planner for statically-stable motion of a legged robotic vehicle over an uneven terrain is presented that can plan the footplacement of individual legs for highly cluttered terrain. A method for determining the traversability over a generic discretised height map terrain is presented. Planning is broken into two levels of refinement to reduce the overall complexity and incorporates a number o...

Daversability Index is introduced in this paper as a new and simple measure for traversabilaty of planetary surfaces by mobile robots. This index is developed using the framework of fuzzy logic, and is expressed by linguistic fuzzy sets that quantify the suitability of the terrain for traverse based on its physical properties, such as slope and roughness. The Ilt.aversability Index is used for ...

We consider the search and secure problem, where intruders are to be detected in a bounded area without allowing them to escape. The problem is tackled by representing the area to be searched as a traversability graph, which is reduced to a tree graph by placing stationary robots to remove loops. The search of the remaining tree is performed using two strategies that represent different trade-o...

Autonomous robotic systems can help for risky interventions to reduce the risk to human lives. An example of such a risky intervention is a camp surveillance scenario, where an environment needs to be patrolled and intruders need to be detected and intercepted. This paper describes the development of a mobile outdoor robot which is capable of performing such a camp surveillance task. The key re...

We consider the geometric problem of deciding whether a narrow planar passage can be traversed by a curve that satisfies pre-specified upper bounds on its curvature. This problem is of importance for pathand motion-planning of autonomous mobile robots, particularly when vehicle dynamical constraints are considered during planning. For a special case of narrow passages, namely, rectangular chann...