The Hulk: Design and Development of a Weather-Proof Vehicle for Long-Term Autonomy in Outdoor Environments

Abstract

In recent years the range of robotics platforms available for research and development has increased dramatically. Despite this there are areas and applications which are not currently well served by the existing available platforms. Many of them are designed for indoor use; the range of outdoor and off-road robotics platforms is less diverse and few address the issue of deployment in hazardous weather conditions and integrate a suitable sensor suite. In addition almost all of the commercially available Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are unsuitable for deployment on delicate surfaces. Given the widespread use of manicured grass within the built environment and agriculture across the western world, this severely limits where they can be deployed and the tasks that can be accomplished. This paper introduces the design principles of a suitable autonomous vehicle. Hulk is built from a commercial zero-turn mower modified for fly-by-wire operation and equipped with a full sensor suite and computing payload. To enable remote, long-term autonomy in diverse environments, several layers of redundant safety systems were designed and installed and the entire assembly made weatherproof.

Keep off the Grass: Permissible Driving Routes from Radar with Weak Audio Supervision

“…In the future, we plan to retrain and test the system on the all-weather platform described in [29], as part of closed-loop autonomy. The proposed system will also be applied in offroad intelligent transportation contexts 4 .…”

RSS-Net: Weakly-Supervised Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation with FMCW Radar

“…The relatively small network (∼ 8M parameters) currently performs well with larger objects and demonstrates robustness to the imperfections of the data generation process. In the future we plan to retrain and test the system on the all-weather platform described in [27].…”

Look Around You: Sequence-based Radar Place Recognition with Learned Rotational Invariance

“…In the future we plan to retrain and test the system on the all-weather platform described in [27], a signficant factor in the development of which was to explore applications of FMCW radar to mobile autonomy in challenging, unstructured environments. We also plan to integrate the system presented in this paper with our mapping and localisation pipeline which is built atop of the scan-matching algorithm of [28], [29].…”