With the wide deployment of redundant manipulators in complex working environments, obstacle avoidance emerges as an important issue to be addressed in robot motion planning. In this paper, a new obstacle avoidance scheme is presented for redundant manipulators. In this scheme, obstacle avoidance is mathematically formulated as a time-varying linearly constrained quadratic programming problem. ...

This paper presents a visual obstacle avoidance system for low-cost autonomous watercraft in riverine environments, such as lakes and rivers. Each watercraft is equipped with a smartphone which offers a single source of perceptual sensing, via a monocular camera. To achieve autonomous navigation in riverine environments, watercraft must overcome the challenges of limited sensing, low computatio...

Research into reactive collision avoidance for unmanned aerial vehicles has been conducted on unmanned terrestrial and mini aerial vehicles utilising active Doppler radar obstacle detection sensors. Flight tests conducted by flying a mini UAV at an obstacle have confirmed that a simple reactive collision avoidance algorithm enables aerial vehicles to autonomously avoid obstacles. This builds up...

This paper describes how fuzzy control can be applied to sonar based obstacle avoidance of HelpMate mobile robot. Behavior-based fuzzy control for HelpXlate mobile robot was designed. The design and implementation of fuzzy control system is described. The fuzzy controller provides the mechanism for solving sens(,r data fi'om all sonar sensors which present differ<,.t infl)rmation. Behavior-base...

This paper addresses the vision based local path planning system for obstacle avoidance. To handle the obstacles which exist beyond the field of view (FOV), we propose a Panoramic Environment Map (PEM) using the MDGHM-SIFT algorithm. Moreover, we propose a Complexity Measure (CM) and Fuzzy logic-based Avoidance Motion Selection (FAMS) system to enable a humanoid robot to automatically decide it...

Previous work in arti cial potentials has demonstrated the need for an obstacle avoidance potential that closely models the obstacle, yet does not generate local minima in the workspace of the manipulator. This paper presents a potential function based on superquadrics, which closely models a large class of object shapes. This potential function also prevents the creation of local minima when i...

This paper describes work on a framework for multi-agent research using low cost Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV’s). In the past this type of research has required significant investment for both the vehicles themselves and the infrastructure necessary to safely conduct experiments. We present an alternative solution using a robust, low cost, off the shelf platform. We demonstrate the capabilities o...

VR lends itself to the study of intersensory calibration in self-motion perception. However, proper calibration of visual and locomotor self-motion in VR is made complicated by the compression of perceived distance and by unfamiliar modes of locomotion. Although adaptation is fairly rapid with exposure to novel sensorimotor correlations, here it is shown that good initial calibration is found w...

Maneuvers of a nonholonomic vehicle in a structured dynamic environment are considered. The paper focuses on motion generation and control methods to autonomously perform lane following/changing and parallel parking maneuvers. Lane following/changing involves the tracking of a nominal trajectory in the traac lane, and the generation and tracking of local lane-changing trajectories, for instance...

This paper presents the first steps towards the evaluation of obstacle avoidance techniques for mobile robots. The idea is to create a methodology to evaluate the performance of the methods given a wide range of work conditions. The work conditions usually include scenarios with very different nature (dense, complex, cluttered, etc). The performance is measured in terms of robotic parameters (r...