The capability of a commercial off-the-shelf amphibious bottom crawling robot is explored for surveying seamless topography and bathymetry across the beachface, surfzone, very nearshore. A real-time-kinematic (RTK) antenna on mast was added to robotic platform, Bayonet-350 (previously C2i SeaOx). Data collected from were compared with those by Coastal Research Amphibious Buggy (CRAB) Lighter Re...

Integrated simulation capabilities that are high-fidelity, fast, and have scalable architecture are essential to support autonomous vehicle design and performance assessment for the U.S. Army's growing use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). The HMMWV simulation described in this paper embodies key features of the real vehicle, including a complex suspension and steering dynamics, wheel-soil mod...

Our research goal is to realize a robust navigation in indoor and outdoor environment for autonomous vehicle. An omnidirectional vehicle driven by four Mecanum wheels was chosen for our research platform. Mecanum wheel has 16 tilted rollers (45 degrees against the direction of wheel rotation) around the wheel, so the vehicle moves omnidirectionally by controlling these wheels independently. How...

Vehicles parked on streets or roads can cause various hazards to people and property when they are swept away by urban floods. It is therefore approproriate to investigate the criterion of vehicle stability for such flood conditions, especially for different scenarios and where the criterion for vehicle stability is usually represented by the incipient velocity for the vehicle. In the current s...

Autonomous ground vehicles navigating on road networks require robust and accurate localization over long term operation and in a wide range of adverse weather and environmental conditions. GPS/INS solutions, which are by themselves insufficient to maintain a vehicle within a lane, can fail due to significant radio frequency noise or jamming, tall buildings, trees, and other blockage or multipa...

Model-based vision techniques originally developed for the recognition and pose recovery of a vehicle in a single image, are used here to track a vehicle through a sequence of images. The knowledge of the position of the camera with respect to the ground plane is used to reduce the search space of possible vehicle positions from six dimensions to three.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have environmental advantages and the capacity for advanced motion control. However, EVs need to be charged frequently due to their limited mileage per charge. A dynamic wireless power transfer (WPT) system for EVs can extend their cruising distance and reduce the size of their energy storage system. However, when being applied to rugged roadways over long distances, it ...