This paper describes an autonomous Intelligent Controller (IC) architecture directly applicable to the design of unmanned autonomous vehicles and performance measures associated with intelligent autonomy. The vehicles may operate independently or cooperate to carry out complex missions involving disparate sensors or payload packages. An approach to measure the performance achieved with collabor...

This paper is concerned with the in-field autonomous operation of unmanned marine vehicles in accordance with convention for safe and proper collision avoidance as prescribed by the Coast Guard Collision Regulations (COLREGS). These rules are written to train and guide safe human operation of marine vehicles and are heavily dependent on human common sense in determining rule applicability as we...

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The capabilities and applications of new drones require a high demand of power that traditional batteries cannot sustain, triggering the need of developing strategies to promote efficient energy usage on drone platforms. However, to reduce the energy consumption it is required to have reliable means to measure the device’s behavior and its relationship to the battery discharge. This paper intro...

Human-robot communication with an underwater vehicle is a complex problem. Standard wireless communication protocols are unavailable, and the lack of direct supervision from surface-based operators reduces situational awareness and operational efficiencies. Here we describe recent research results with tethered operation of autonomous vehicles at depth by diving operators. We review different o...

Unmanned Ground Vehicle’s (UGV) have to cope with the most complex range of dynamic and variable obstacles and therefore need to be highly intelligent in order to cope with navigating in such a cluttered environment. When traversing over different terrains (whether it is a UGV or a commercial manned vehicle) different drive styles and configuration settings need to be selected in order to trave...

Hydrodynamic coefficients are the foundation of unmanned underwater vehicles modeling and controller design. In order to reduce identification complexity and acquire necessary hydrodynamic coefficients for controllers design, the motion of the unmanned underwater vehicle was separated into vertical motion and horizontal motion models. Hydrodynamic coefficients were regarded as mapping parameter...