This paper presents a novel obstacle avoidance approach that is capable of dealing with both static and dynamic obstacles in the environment with guaranteed collision-free navigation for haptic teleoperation of VTOL aerial robots. The proposed approach modulates the set point for the vehicle’s controller based on the user input energy, estimated potential energy and vehicle’s kinetic energy. By...

This paper presents ROCI, a framework for developing applications for multi-robot teams. In ROCI, each robot is considered a node which contains several modules and may export different types of services and capabilities to other nodes. Each node runs a kernel that mediates the interactions of the robots in a team. This kernel keeps an updated database of all nodes and the functionalities that ...

Hyper-redundant robots have a large or infinite number of degrees of freedom. Such robots are analogous to snakes or tentacles and are useful for operation in highly constrained environments and novel forms of locomotion. This paper reviews newly developed methods for the kinematic analysis of hyper-redundant manipulators. These methods can be applied to a wide variety of hyper-redundant morpho...

This paper proposes a new obstacle avoidance algorithm for the CONTROLAB AGV which uses a similar strategy adopted by a blind person to avoid obstacles while walking. The AGV moves within an office environment with a known floorplan and uses an "electronic stick" consisting of infrared sensors to detect unknown obstacles. Initially a global potential field function is defined for each floorplan...

This paper is concerned with an application of the use of extra freedom in the coordinates transformation for exact linearizaion. We apply this technique to obstacle avoidance of a manipulator in the master-slave control. We show how to use the freedom for such an object and give the way to construct the linearizing coordinates transformation and feedback. Furthermore we evaluate the e ectivene...

This paper tackles the regulation problem of wheeled mobile robot (WMR) by using the nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) in polar coordination framework. The terminal state penalty, terminal state constraints, and the input saturation constraints are taken into consideration in this optimization problem to guarantee the closed-loop regulation performance and stability. Furthermore, we imp...

In this paper a reactive local navigation system is presented, for an autonomous non-holonomic mobile robot navigating in dynamic environments. The reactive navigation system integrates an obstacle detection method [4] and a new reactive collision avoidance method. The sensory perception is based in a laser range finder (LRF) system. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness ...

A real time navigating system, called Destination Driven Navigator, is developed. This paper presents a new obstacle representation method named Cross-Line, a new concept “work space” to reduce the robot’s search space and the environment storage cost, an Adapted Regression Model to predict the dynamic obstacles’ motion, and the Multi-State Path Repair rules to quickly translate an infeasible p...

This paper describes updated results from a partnership between the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation and the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop, improve, and flight test a sensor, guidance, navigation, control, and real-time flight path optimization system to support high performance Nap-of-the-Earth (NOE) helicopter flight. The emphasis here is on optimization for a combination of low hei...

In this paper we present a novel method for obstacle avoidance using the stereo camera. The conventional obstacle avoidance methods and their limitations are discussed. A new algorithm is developed for the real-time obstacle avoidance which responds faster to unexpected obstacles. In this approach the depth map is divided into optimized number of regions and the minimum depth at each section is...