This paper introduces our robotic system named UGAV (Unmanned Ground-Air Vehicle) consisting of two semi-autonomous robot platforms, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper focuses on three topics of the inspection with the combined UGV and UAV: (A) teleoperated control by means of cell or smart phones with a new concept of automatic configuration of th...

The objective of this paper is to show how PHM concepts can be included in the design of an autonomous Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) and in doing so, provide effective diagnostic/prognostic capabilities during system operation. The authors propose a PHM Cycle that is divided into two parts, covering the design of the Autonomous PHM system and the operation of the PHM system in real-time applicatio...

Unmanned aerial and ground vehicle teams present a majoropportunity for expanded operation over individual autonomous vehicles alone. The different perspectives available for sensors, the different operating ranges and payload capabilities, and the ability to observe a target environment from all angles at once all add up to significant improvements in ability to search for and track targets, t...

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, in conjunction with Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Advanced Development Programs, performed a set of experiments in cooperation with the U.S. Navy involving collaborative, unmanned surface and air vehicle mission execution. Our multi-domain, collaborative research focused on increasing the ability of...

This paper introduces the autonomous vehicle Pharos, which participated in the 2010 Autonomous Vehicle Competition organized by Hyundai-Kia motors. Pharos was developed for high-speed on/off-road unmanned driving avoiding diverse patterns of obstacles. For the high speed traveling up to 60 Km/h, long range terrain perception, real-time path planning and high speed vehicle motion control algorit...

We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-ba...

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for distributed autonomous robotics systems. In this article, a prototype distributed architecture for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle experimentation is presented which supports the development of intelligent capabilities and th...

Integrated simulation capabilities that are high-fidelity, fast, and have scalable architecture are essential to support autonomous vehicle design and performance assessment for the U.S. Army's growing use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). The HMMWV simulation described in this paper embodies key features of the real vehicle, including a complex suspension and steering dynamics, wheel-soil mod...

This paper describes an intelligent autonomous airborne flight capability that is being used as a test bed for future technology development. The unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) fly under autonomous control of both an onboard computer and an autopilot. The onboard computer provides the mission control and runs the autonomous Intelligent Controller (IC) software while the autopilot controls the veh...

This paper presents the application of the agent-based multimethod simulation approach to the development of the Unmanned Ground Vehicle(UGV) simulation testbed prototype to support both concept exploration and the performance-based requirement analysis of future UGVs. We describe the UGV simulation testbed prototype (UGVSimp) incorporating 1) UGV mission scenario, 2) the operational concepts o...