An original method for the real-time estimation of the roll angle using low-cost sensors in two-wheeled vehicles is proposed. The roll angle greatly affects the dynamics of singletrack vehicles and its estimation is essential in control systems such as ABS, Traction Control, as well as Curve and Collision Warning, or even active suspensions. The proposed method uses a non-linear Kalman filter, ...

The Leg-Wheel-Vehicle paradigm offers remarkable and diverse opportunities for creation of mobile and maneuverable terrestrial locomotion systems. However, this capability needs to be unlocked by careful design and control of the individual articulations, the sub-chains and the systems as a whole. Viewing leg-wheel vehicles as another class of parallelkinematic systems now facilitates the syste...

Robots are used increasingly to execute dangerous tasks and military missions. Autonomous robots are the warriors of the future, executing missions without requiring continuous supervision. Multimodal interfaces are the interfaces of the future in which speech, gestures, gaze, and other modalities are combined to provide a natural way for humans to communicate with machines. In this thesis I pr...

Conventional nonholonomic motion planning and control theories do not directly apply to “overconstrained vehicles,” such as the Sojourner vehicle of the Mars Pathfinder mission. This paper investigates some basic issues that are necessary to build a motion planning and control framework for this potentially important class of mobile robots. A power dissipation approach is used to model the gove...