Future transportation systems will require a number of drastic measures, mostly to lower traffic jams and air pollution in urban areas. Automatically guided vehicles capable of driving in a platoon fashion will represent an important feature of such systems. Platooning of a group of automated wheeled mobile robots relying on relative sensor information only is addressed in this paper. Each vehi...

This paper addresses the path following problem of a wheeled mobile robot with rhombic like kinematics (two drivable and steerable wheels) operating in cluttered environments. Four new path following controllers are developed to steer the kinematic model of a rhombic like vehicle along a desired path: three are based on feedback laws derived at a kinematic level with geometrical inspiration; wh...

The Virtual Environment Vehicle Interface (VEVI), developed by the NASA Ames Research Center’s Intelligent Mechanisms Group, is a modular operator interface for direct teleoperation and supervisory control of robotic vehicles. Virtual environments enable the efficient display and visualization of complex data. This characteristic allows operators to perceive and control complex systems in a nat...

Electronic instrumentation and sensors are extensively adopted on board of vehicles to prevent the road accidents and improve the overall driving experience. On the other hand, the development of fault detection strategies are usually carried out in order to limit the direct impact of electronics on the vehicle cost. To this aim the employment of the analytical redundancy of measurement informa...

A method is presented for planning obstacle-avoiding paths for a system which exhibits nonholonomic constraints. The method is based on the use of harmonic functions. Linear constraints on the velocity of a nonholonomic system can be directly expressed as Neumann boundary conditions for a harmonic function. Such boundary conditions are easily represented in a resistive network. The resulting po...

This paper presents the application of Buckingham’s π theorem to scale the powertrain of a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) by deriving non dimensional ratios called π parameters. A HIL setup is constructed and the resulting longitudinal dynamics of the scaled vehicle are validated against those of the full scale vehicle. This is performed with the ultimate goal of testing coo...

Typical formulations of the forward and inverse velocity kinematics of wheeled mobile robots assume flat terrain, consistent constraints, and no slip at the wheels. Such assumptions can sometimes permit the wheel constraints to be substituted into the differential equation to produce a compact, apparently unconstrained result. However, in the general case, the terrain is not flat, the wheel con...

Robotics can play a key role when dealing with environments that are inaccessible or hazardous for humans including ship hulls, bridge installations, oil rigs, and first reponse scenarios. Due to irregular terrain, wheeled vehicles are ineffective at traversing the necessary terrain. Legged systems are a salient solution. However, legged systems require special considerations regarding workspac...

A new dynamic friction force model for the longitudinal road/tire interaction for wheeled ground vehicles is validated via experiments with an actual passenger vehicle. Contrary to common static friction/slip maps, this new dynamic friction model is able to accurately capture the transient behavior of the friction force observed during transitions between braking and acceleration. A velocitydep...

The paper addresses the problem of steering a fleet of wheeled robots along a set of given spatial paths, while keeping a desired inter-vehicle formation pattern. This problem arises for example when multiple vehicles are required to scan a given area in cooperation. In a possible mission scenario, one of the vehicles acts a leader and follows a path accurately, while the other vehicles follow ...