T he process of research, development, and acquisition to procure military vehicles has historically been challenging for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, the difficulty lies in translating the threat (such as an enemy antitank guided missile) into a design criterion (such as a protection requirement of so many inches of armor plating). In other instances, problems have included a mismatch betw...

The general purpose of designing a large, lightweight, inflatable rover is to allow the rover to travel over rocks instead of around them, as present planetary rovers are required to do. This can greatly increase a rover’s versatility, speed, and range. It has been estimated that in the 5% rockiest regions of Mars, approximately 1% of the surface is covered by rocks of 0.5 m or higher [4]. Earl...

Two-wheeled mobile robots (2WMRs) with lower center of gravity exhibit more practicality and operability because their mass center locates on the bottom of the configuration center. By analyzing motion behaviors of the vehicle body, we present the underactuated property and give the dynamics equation of this kind of robot. The system matrices and nonholonomic constraint change drastically becau...

This paper derives a new type of control law to steer the dynamic model of a wheeled robot of unicycle type along a desired spatial path. The methodology adopted for path following control deals explicitly with vehicle dynamics and plant parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, it overcomes stringent initial condition constraints that are present in a number of path following control strategies desc...

A convoy problem is formulated and solved for two four-wheeled vehicles. The task is for the second vehicle to follow the leader’s trajectory with a constant time delay. This delayed trajectory can be viewed as the trajectory of a delayed leader. This novel constant-time-delay concept allows for the estimation of the delayed leader’s speed and heading using the vehicle kinematics. Decoupled lon...

Robotic ground vehicles are systems that use gravity and contact forces with the ground to perform motion. In this paper we will focus on n-wheeled vehicles able to perform motion with all the wheels maintaining contact at the same time. The main goal of this work is to establish the implication of the topological architecture of the vehicle mechanism on criteria such as climbing skills, robust...

This article presents the development and control of a two‐wheeled mobile robot as the base of a human carrier for an amusement/transportation vehicle. The robot has a combined structure of two systems: a line tracking mobile robot and an inverted pendulum system that maintains balance while following a line on the floor. The mobile robot is purposely designed to carry a huma...

Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) sensors are widely used as a simple presence trigger for alarms and a reliable counter for people in security home and smart office. Most paper have focused on the design and application of such systems, however, few research has be done on the detecting of targets in an outdoor environment using PIR sensors. In this paper, we realize a detecting system by means of P...

A new type of control law is derived to steer the dynamic model of a wheeled robot of unicycle type along a desired path. The methodology adopted for path following control deals explicitly with vehicle dynamics and plant parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, it overcomes stringent initial condition constraints that are present in a number of path following control strategies described in the lit...