In this paper, an intelligent navigation system for an unmanned underwater vehicle powered by renewable energy and designed for shadow water inspection in missions of a long duration is proposed. The system is composed of an underwater vehicle, which tows a surface vehicle. The surface vehicle is a small boat with photovoltaic panels, a methanol fuel cell and comm...

We present MENSA (Mission Effectiveness and Safety Assessment), a health monitoring and contingency resolution system architecture that supports unmanned vehicle self-awareness with respect to the vehicle's ability to carry out its missions. MENSA analyzes mission plans to identify required vehicle capabilities. Throughout the mission, MENSA monitors onboard sensors to diagnose faults and maps ...

Unmanned ground vehicles currently exhibit simple autonomous behaviours. This paper presents a control algorithmdeveloped for a tracked vehicle to autonomously climbobstacles by varying its front and back track orientations. A reactive controller computes a desired geometric configuration based on terrain information. A reinforcement learning algorithm enhances vehicle mobility by finding effec...

A vision based navigation system is a basic tool to provide autonomous operations of unmanned vehicles. For o road navigation that means that the vehicle equipped with a stereo vision system and perhaps a laser ranging device shall be able to maintain a high level of autonomy under various illumination conditions and with little a priori information about the underlying scene. The task becomes ...

[1] ABSTRACT The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) is designed for colleges and universities to compete in the design and construction of an autonomous aerial vehicle. Pima Community College is being represented by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Club. The UAV Club has designed a primary vehicle and three subvehicles that will be used in the competition. The vehicles were desig...

Making an Autonomous Electric Vehicle (AEV) and able to operate “unmanned” requires extensive theoretical as well as practical knowledge. An AEV must be able to make decisions and respond to situations completely on its own. Buggy car are used a as Electric Vehicle (EV) and set up with several equipment and sensor as an AEV. A camera is installed in front of the AEV and is used to obtain image ...

The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The Boston University have cooperated to develop an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) that competed in and won the 1996 International Aerial Robotics Competition, sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, International (AUVSI). Development of the vehicle continues to support ongoing research in ...

The unsteady and nonlinear aerodynamic characteristics of the Meridian unmanned aerial system in the presence of wind shear are investigated using the recorded test data during flights in Polar Regions. The Meridian UAS is designed to provide an aerial platform for ice-penetrating radar developed for research in Polar Regions. The Meridian Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAS) is a 499 kg (1,100 pounds...

This paper focuses on a critical component of the situational awareness (SA), the control of autonomous vertical flight for tactical unmanned aerial vehicle (TUAV). With the SA strategy, we proposed a two stage flight control procedure using two autonomous control subsystems to address the dynamics variation and performance requirement difference in initial and final stages of flight trajectory...

This paper reports on a Naval Engineering Education Center (NEEC) design-build-test project focused on the development of a fully autonomous system for landing Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on transiting ships at sea. Our NEEC team of engineering students researched image processing techniques, estimation frameworks, and control algorithms to collaboratively learn and train in Navy-relev...