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The education of Systems Engineers involves many learning aspects that cannot be taught through lecturing alone, such as how to handle unforeseen issues and establish a holistic view of a system. An educational approach is presented that allows students to experience key phases of a Systems Engineering life-cycle, from requirements and design to system realisation and test, by using LEGO® MINDSTORMS®...
A typical feature of robotic architectures are its reactivity and self-adaptivity. In practice, this is achieved by context-dependent dynamic invocation of software components in robotic architectures. In this paper, we specifically address how this self-adaptation capability can be formally defined and modeled in an architecture-independent way. We propose a probabilistic approach that facilitates...
This paper introduces a novel Human Machine Interface (HMI) that allows users to interact with a fleet of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) used for logistics operations in industrial environments. The interface is developed for providing operators with information regarding the fleet of AGVs, and the status of the industrial environment. Information is provided in an intuitive manner, utilizing a...
In this paper a unified motion control and planning algorithm dedicated for the waypoint following task realized by a skid-steering is presented. In order to reduce excessive slip effects between robot wheels and ground it is assumed that the vehicle moves with bounded velocities and accelerations. The motion controller has been designed using formal methods to ensure asymptotically stable tracking...
The Space Exploration Guided Heuristic Search (SEHS) method solves the motion planning problem, especially for car-like robots, in two steps: a circle-based space exploration in the workspace followed by a circle-guided heuristic search in the configuration space. This paper extends this approach for kinodynamic planning in dynamic environments by performing the exploration in both space and time...
We present a new mapping and navigation system based on human-recognizable landmarks with highly compact representations. Road segments, intersections and salient structures such as houses and trees are detected using vision and LiDAR data. The landmarks are entered in a sparse metrictopological map that is used for navigation. In contrast to traditional SLAM approaches, however, we only store the...
The Harvard Robobee is a fly-sized aerial vehicle that can perform controlled flight maneuvers. But this robot is unable to control its yaw or heading angle to a desired value. Motivated by this deficiency, we propose a new method to produce yaw-axis rotations. Termed wriggle-steering, it consists of driving body oscillations around its two other rotational axes. Because no torque is applied directly...
We introduce a new problem in the area of scheduling and route planning operations called the service agent transport problem (SATP). Within the SATP, autonomous service agents must perform tasks at a number of locations. The agents are free to move between locations, however, the agents may also be transported throughout the region by a limited number of faster-moving transport agents. The goal of...
This paper describes enhancements made to the distributed performance impact (PI) algorithm and presents the results of trials that show how the work advances the state-of-the-art in single-task, single-robot, time-extended, multiagent task assignment for time-critical missions. The improvement boosts performance by integrating the architecture with additional action selection methods that increase...
This paper describes a vision-based method of guiding autonomous vehicles within crop rows in agricultural fields where the crop rows are challenging to detect or their appearance is not known a-priori. The location of the crop rows is estimated with an SVM regression algorithm using colour, texture and 3D structure descriptors from a forward facing stereo camera pair. Our system rapidly learns a...
Vehicle localization in large-scale urban environments has been commonly addressed as a map-matching problem in the literature. Generally, the maps are 2D images of the world where each pixel covers a part of it. However, building maps for large-scale urban environments requires driving the vehicle along the desired path at least once. In order to simplify this task, in this work, we propose a new...
Teams of fixed wing micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) could provide a wide area coverage and relay data in wireless ad-hoc networks. In such applications fixed wing MAVs have to be able to regulate an inter-robot distance. Fixed wing MAVs have reduced maneuverability, that is, they cannot perform sharp turns or hover on the spot. This kinematic property presents the main challenge to design a formation...
This paper describes a Robot-Audition based Car Human Machine Interface (RA-CHMI). A RA-CHMI, like a car navigation system, has difficulty dealing with voice commands, since there are many noise sources in a car, including road noise, air-conditioner, music, and passengers. Microphone array processing developed in robot audition, may overcome this problem. Robot audition techniques, including sound...
Path planning is a fundamental task for any kind of autonomous mobile robot. In this paper, we present a motion planning technique on the three-dimensional space considering vehicles with spatial curvature and pitch (climb or dive) angle constraints. Concerning real fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles, we face the problem of calculating paths with continuous...
Here we present a suite of theoretical, computational, and experimental studies culminating in the first aerial and aquatic capable insect-scale robot. We develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to model fluid-wing interaction in air and water. From CFD and a system dynamics analysis we predict that a multi-modal flapping strategy will enable locomotion in both air and water for a...
Seagoing vessels have to undergo regular visual inspections in order to detect the typical defective situations affecting metallic structures, such as cracks and corrosion. These inspections are currently performed by ship surveyors manually at a great cost. To make ship inspections safer and more cost-efficient, this paper presents a Micro-Aerial Vehicle (MAV) intended for visual inspection and based...
This paper is devoted to a centralized mission planner for a group of marine robots. Mission is considered consisting of straight line segments (usually called tacks). The planner takes segments spatial configuration into account and solves a problem similar to the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (MTSP) in order to assign a sequence of segments to each vehicle. The contribution of this paper...
Trajectory tracking is defined as getting from point A to point B at a certain time, as the time history of a continuous sequence of configurations between the current configuration of the robot and its goal configuration. In the simulation shows that is required some seconds for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to return to the path specified as a certain trajectories, if the track form a 90...
Autonomous and semi-autonomous smoothly interruptible trajectories are developed which are highly suitable for application in tele-operated mobile robots, operator on-board military mobile ground platforms, and other mobility assistance platforms. These trajectories will allow a navigational system to provide assistance to the operator in the loop, for purpose built robots or remotely operated platforms...
A decentralized fault diagnosis and accommodation scheme in discrete time for teams of cooperative mobile robots is presented. Each vehicle estimates, via a local observer, the overall state of the team, which is used to compute its local control input and a set of residual vectors. Each residual is sensible to a fault occurring on a single teammate, even not in direct communication, and the fault...
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