This paper describes the autonomous navigation and control of an undersea vehicle using a vehicle control architecture based on the Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation and a terrain-aided navigation technique based on simultaneous localisation and map building. Development of the low-speed platform models for vehicle control and the theoretical and practical details of mapping and po...

In many robotic exploration missions, robots have to learn specific policies that allow them to: (i) select high level goals (e.g., identify specific destinations), (ii) navigate (reach those destinations), (iii) and adapt to their environment (e.g., modify their behavior based on changing environmental conditions). Furthermore, those policies must be robust to signal noise or unexpected situat...

We present an autonomous airborne video-aided navigation system that uses video from an onboard camera, data from an IMU, and digitally stored georeferenced landmark images. The system enables self-contained navigation in the absence of GPS. Relative position and motion are tracked by comparing simple mathematical representations of consecutive video frames. Periodically, a single image frame i...

5 Executive summary This document is a pre-study for the project Autonomous Navigation for Forest Machines. The project is part of a long-term vision, of developing an unmanned vehicle that transports timber from the area of felling to the main roads for further transportation. The main goal of the project is to present a working solution for autonomous path tracking navigation, to be implement...

Biological creatures apparently execute many tasks in the world by using a combination of routine skills, without doing any extensive reasoning. In recent years researchers have used this as a guide to formulate behav-ioral architectures for robot control. We have adopted the Teleo-Reactive (TR) formalism introduced by Nils Nils-son for our behavioral architecture. The formalism is a programmin...

This thesis addresses some key issues which affect the level of autonomy inherent in visual navigation systems, with wider applicability in a range of fields. They can be divided into two areas. Firstly, automated initialisation, in which the kinematic and camera calibration parameters needed for an active camera platform are calculated without user interaction. Secondly, the complexity problem...

This thesis was written during the WITAS UAV Project where one of the goals has been the development of a software/hardware architecture for an unmanned autonomous helicopter, in addition to autonomous functionalities required for complex mission scenarios. The algorithms developed here have been tested on an unmanned helicopter platform developed by Yamaha Motor Company called the RMAX. The ch...

It is challenging to develop a control algorithm that uses only one sensor to guide an autonomous vehicle. The objective of this research was to develop a control algorithm with a single sensor for an autonomous agricultural vehicle that could identify landmarks in the row-type plantation environment and navigate a vehicle to a point-to-go target location through the plantation. To enable such ...

This work describes techniques using sonar sensors for environmental feature detection and identiication. By detecting common features in indoor environments and using them as landmarks , a robot can navigate reliably, recovering its pose when necessary. Results using a multiple hypothesis testing procedure for feature localization and identiication show that accurate feature information can be...