Nacrtak In Italy, where conventional forests have a protective rather than productive purpose, some silvicultural operations as first and second thinning could be carried out in an economic way adopting systems based on small scale mechanization. Authors tested a system based on small scale mechanization for bunching and skidding operations, using an All Terrain Vehicle (ATV), a compact, agile ...

Expert off road drivers have found through experience that ruts formed on soft terrains as a result of vehicular transit can be used to improve vehicle safety and performance. Rut following improves vehicle performance by reducing the energy wasted on compacting the ground as the vehicle traverses over the terrain. Furthermore, proper rut following can improve vehicle safety on turns and slopes...

The real-time coordination and control of a many motion degrees of freedom (dof) unmanned ground vehicle under dynamic conditions in a complex environment is nearly impossible for a human operator to accomplish. Needed are adaptive on-board mechanisms to quickly complete sensor-effector loops to maintain balance and leverage. This paper contains a description of our approach to the control prob...

Automatic vehicle extraction from an airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud is very useful for many applications, such as digital elevation model generation and 3D building reconstruction. In this article, an object-based point cloud analysis (OBPCA) method is proposed for vehicle extraction from an ALS point cloud. First, a segmentation-based progressive TIN (triangular irregular network) d...

This paper is about using range-only data to navigate an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We assume the vehicle is equipped with conventional long base line (LBL) transceiver which measures acoustic time of flights (TOFs) between vehicle and small submerged transponders. Using only range data and no prior information other than approximate water column depth, we solve for both transponder l...

Set-membership identification of a Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) model describing the vehicle lateral dynamics is addressed in the paper. The model structure, chosen as much as possible on the ground of physical insights into the vehicle lateral behavior, consists of two single-input single-output LPV models relating the steering angle to the yaw rate and to the sideslip angle. A set of experi...

Wing-in-Ground Effect vehicle (WIG-craft) or ekranoplane landing direction optimization criteria is suggested which heeds the irregular sea waves features and provides the minimal mechanical strain on the vehicle body at hydrodynamic braking. The problem of automatic choice of the landing trajectory direction regarding the main direction of sea waves spread is under consideration. The peculiari...

MISSION AWARE ENERGY SAVING STRATEGIES FOR ARMY GROUNDVEHICLESbyMACAM S DATTATHREYAAugust 2013 Advisor: Dr. Harpreet SinghMajor: Computer Engineering Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Fuel energy is a basic necessity for this planet and the modern technology to performmany activities on earth. On the other hand, quadrupled automotive vehicle usage by thecommercial industr...

This paper presents a novel velocity estimation method for ground vehicles. The task here is to automatically estimate vehicle speed from video sequences acquired with a fixed mounted camera. The vehicle motion is detected and tracked along the frames using optical flow algorithm. The distance traveled by the vehicle is calculated using the movement of the centroid over the frames and the speed...

In this paper the problem of image stabilization is defined as follows: a camera mounted on a moving vehicle collects a sequence of images. The vehicle is trying to move along a smooth trajectory. In fact, however, the motion of the vehicle varies from the desired smooth motion; for a ground vehicle, this would primarily be due to roughness of the terrain. The goal of image stabilization is to ...