Experimental results relating to the steering control system of an experimental autonomous vehicle operating in a pre-defined and structured environment are presented. A method of steering control is formulated which relates second-order criteria, such as rise time and damping factor, to the parameters of the control system. With the control system described, the vehicle can track a path of con...

Autonomous rotorcrafts are required to operate in cluttered, unknown, and unstructured environments. Guaranteeing the safety of these systems is critical for their successful deployment. Current methodologies for evaluating or ensuring safety either do not guarantee safety or severely limit the performance of the rotorcrafts. Autonomous vehicles need to operate at their limits to effectively co...

The autonomous vehicle is an automated system equipped with features like environment perception, decision-making, motion planning, and control and execution technology. Navigating in an unstructured and complex environment is a huge challenge for autonomous vehicles, due to the irregular shape of road, the requirement of real-time planning, and the nonholonomic constraints of vehicle. This pap...

AND SUMMARY Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) systems (which include in-vehicle forwardand side-looking sensors) can be supplemented by vehicle-vehicle and vehiclehighway cooperative and, if possible, passive elements to comprise a “sensor-friendly” highway environment that would enhance the operational efficiency, and ultimately, the safety benefits of emerging IVI driver-assist ...

An overview of the NASA Ames Research Center Autonomous Rotorcraft Project (ARP) is presented. The project brings together several technologies to address NASA and US Army autonomous vehicle needs, including a reactive planner for mission planning and execution, control system design incorporating a detailed understanding of the platform dynamics, and health monitoring and diagnostics. A candid...

This paper outlines the design of an autonomous flying vehicle (AFV) for use in researching formation flying. Specifically, we have designed a small autonomous model helicopter as a reference vehicle. Once several more units have been constructed, these vehicles will form a test bed for formation experiments. In this paper various design decisions are presented as well as results from early tes...

We present a framework for vision-based model predictive control (MPC) for the task of aggressive, high-speed autonomous driving. Our approach uses deep convolutional neural networks to predict cost functions from input video which are directly suitable for online trajectory optimization with MPC. We demonstrate the method in a high speed autonomous driving scenario, where we use a single monoc...

This paper describes a simulation system proposed in order to study and to implement intelligent autonomous vehicle control. The developed system can automatically drive a vehicle, implementing a robust control system capable of simulating in a realistic way autonomous parking in a parallel parking space. The system controls the vehicles based on the reading of sonar sensors and automatically g...

We present a framework for vision-based model predictive control (MPC) for the task of aggressive, high-speed autonomous driving. Our approach uses deep convolutional neural networks to predict cost functions from input video which are directly suitable for online trajectory optimization with MPC. We demonstrate the method in a high speed autonomous driving scenario, where we use a single monoc...