Less than half the Earth's landmass is accessible to existing wheeled and tracked vehicles. But people and animals using their legs can go almost anywhere. Our mission at Boston Dynamics is to develop a new breed of rough-terrain robots that capture the mobility, autonomy and speed of living creatures. Such robots will travel in outdoor terrain that is too steep, rutted, rocky, wet, muddy, and ...

This paper presents recent research efforts to extend the functionality of unmanned aerial vehicles beyond passive observation to active interaction with and manipulation of objects. The archetypical aerial manipulation task — grasping objects during flight — is difficult due to the unstable dynamics of flying vehicles and limited positional accuracy currently demonstrated by hovering vehicles....

A general proecological urban road traffic control idea for the street canyon is proposed with emphasis placed on development of advanced continuum field gasdynamical (hydrodynamical) control model of the street canyon. The continuum field model of optimal control of street canyon is studied. The mathematical physics approach (Eulerian approach) to vehicular movement, to pollutants’ emission an...

Bridging relations are frequently used to provide engineering aerodynamic predictions in the transitional regime between free-molecular and continuum ows. Such predictions are important for mission studies of high-speed planetary entry vehicles to provide accurate analysis of trajectory dynamics, vehicle stability, and landing footprint. However, empirical parameters in these bridging relations...

Distributed Reactive Collision Avoidance Emmett Lalish Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Kristi A. Morgansen Aeronautics and Astronautics Collision avoidance is an important aspect of multivehicle coordination because it prevents vehicles from disrupting or destroying each other. The work contained in this dissertation concerns a novel approach to the n-vehicle collision avoidance p...

This paper addresses the problem of cooperative path-following of multiple autonomous vehicles. Stated briefly, the problem consists in steering a group of vehicles along specified paths, while keeping a desired spatial formation arrangement. For a given class of autonomous surface vessels, it is shown how Lyapunov based techniques and graph theory can be brought together to design a decentrali...

A general proecological urban road traffic control idea for the street canyon is proposed with emphasis placed on development of advanced continuum field gasdynamical (hydrodynamical) control model of the street canyon. The continuum field model of optimal control of street canyon is studied. The mathematical physics approach (Eulerian approach) to vehicular movement, to pollutants’ emission an...

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for decision-making on autonomous lane change manoeuvre in vehicles. The proposed approach defines a number of constraints, based on the vehicle’s dynamics and environmental conditions, which must be satisfied for a safe and comfortable lane change manoeuvre. Inclusion of the lateral position of other vehicles on the road and the tyre-road friction are the ...

Tire forces are the major forces propelling the road vehicles. They significantly affect the dynamic behavior of the vehicles. Estimation of the tire forces is essential in vehicle dynamics and control. This paper presents an observer-based scheme for estimation of the longitudinal tire force of electric vehicles in real time. The observer is based on a nonlinearity observer method. The pole-pl...

Perception technologies in Autonomous Driving are experiencing their golden age due to the advances in Deep Learning. Yet, most of these systems rely on the semantically rich information of RGB images. Deep Learning solutions applied to the data of other sensors typically mounted on autonomous cars (e.g. lidars or radars) are not explored much. In this paper we propose a novel solution to under...