Toward a generic UGV autopilot

Pose estimation of Ackerman steering vehicles for outdoors autonomous navigation

“…Due to the nonholonomic constrains of Ackermann steering, the control law defined by (15) will not work when the car is close to the goal. We overcome this by going to the next waypoint when the vehicle is close to the setpoint, or stopping if there are no more waypoints.…”

“…The code is written in Python, using a multi threaded architecture; the SciPy and NumPy libraries are used for all the matrix computations. A detailed description of the implementation is available in [15].…”

Experiments with autonomous mobile radios for wireless tethering in tunnels

“…Additionally various operator interfaces were used. In this section we detail these system components, with the exception of the miniBaja vehicle, which was described in Moore et al 14 Figure 3 shows the EZ-Go golf cart that was modified to enable drive-by-wire and drive-by-computer operation, thus enabling its use as an AMR. Modifications included actuation, sensor additions, on-board computing, and operator interfaces, each described below.…”

“…outdoor radio tethering with one autonomous follower that uses wall-following-based steering control (this experiment uses the autonomous vehicle platform discussed in Moore et al 14 );…”

“…The goal is for the AMR to autonomously move so as to achieve the same RSS between itself and the base and between itself and the leader. Although the experiments described involve only one follower, the ideas are easily extended to multiple followers (see Moore et al 14 ) and if there is more than one follower, then the goal of each AMR is to equalize the signal strength between itself and the radios behind and in front of the AMR. The meaning of ‘person-in-the-loop’ is explained in the appropriate sections below.…”