An autonomous robot must be able to sense its environment and react appropriately in a variable environment. The University of Cincinnati Robot team is actively involved in building a small, unmanned, autonomously guided vehicle for the International Ground Robotics Contest organized by Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) each year. The unmanned vehicle is supposed to...

In this paper we address the development of a single-rotor tail-sitter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), whose configuration provides structural benefits for flight stabilization. The mathematical model of the vertical take-off landing (VTOL) aircraft is obtained through the Newton-Euler approach. In order to stabilize the vehicle we employ a control algorithm based on separated saturation functio...

The Flying Gator is an unmanned aerial vehicle developed to support investigations regarding concurrent and parallel control for robotic and embedded systems. During ten weeks in the summer of 2010, we designed, built, and tested an airframe, control electronics, and a concurrent firmware capable of sustaining autonomous level flight. Ultimately, we hope to have a robust, open source control sy...

We use Sarnoff’s next-generation video processor, the PVT-200, to demonstrate real-time algorithms for stereo processing, obstacle detection, and terrain estimation from stereo cameras mounted on a moving vehicle. Sarnoff’s stereo processing and obstacle detection capabilities are currently being used in several Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) programs, including MDARS-E and DEMO III. Sarnoff’s t...

Significant advances in various relevant science and engineering disciplines have propelled the development of more advanced, yet reliable and practical underwater vehicles. A great array of vehicle types and applications has been produced along with a wide range of innovative approaches for enhancing the performance of unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). These recent advances enable the extensi...

Remote monitoring is an essential task to help maintaining Earth ecosystems. A notorious example is the monitoring of riverine environments. The solution purposed in this paper is to use an electric boat (ASV Autonomous Surface Vehicle) operating in symbiosis with a quadrotor (UAV – Unmanned Air Vehicle). We present the architecture and solutions adopted and at the same time compare it with oth...

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are prohibitively expensive for use in civilian surveillance applications. This is in large part due to the manufactures need to recoup the costs of research and development. The more intelligence that is incorporated into unmanned vehicles, the more expensive it is to validate. At Cornell University an autopilot system for UAVs has been developed and ...

This paper describes an iterative algorithm for registration of 3D LADAR data. The proposed approach is iconic in nature with suitable modifications to deal with false/spurious matches, occlusions and outliers. Experimental results using data obtained from field trials on an eXperimental Unmanned Vehicle (XUV) are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach. The paper also details ong...

(ABSTRACT) Many applications for unmanned vehicles involve autonomous interaction between two or more craft, and therefore, relative navigation is a key issue to explore. Several high fidelity hardware simulations exist to produce accurate dynamics. However, these simulations are restricted by size, weight, and power needed to operate them. The use of a small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for t...

A semi-autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), named VSOR, is being developed at the Laboratory of Sensors and Actuators at the University of Sao Paulo. The vehicle has been designed to provide inspection and intervention capabilities in specific missions in deep water oil fields. This work presents a methodology to identify the drag coefficients and virtual mass/inertia of an open-frame ...