The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego has been involved in the continuing development of obstacle avoidance for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) towards the aim of a high level of autonomous navigation. An autonomous USV can fulfill a variety of missions and applications that are of increasing interest for the US Navy and other Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Se...

Industrial robot based production and assembly automation increases the throughput of a company but on the other hand enhances the need for robot intelligence in terms of decision making in collisions scenarios. A robot manipulator, working at the industrial facility, should be able to predict potential collisions and automatically prevent them with a safe detour around the obstacle/human. Indu...

This paper presents a controller for whole-arm obstacle avoidance for the slave robot in an unilateral teleoperated robotic system. The slave controller is free of robot inverse kinematics model, and it is conformed of two parts. First a cartesian PID controller is used to render closed loop system stability. The second controller part is the on-line solution of a dynamic optimization problem. ...

Limited by visual percepts elicited by existing visual prothesis, it’s necessary to enhance its functionality to fulfill some challenging tasks for the blind such as obstacle avoidance. This paper provides a new methodology for obstacle avoidance in simulated prosthetic vision by modelling and classifying spatiotemporal (ST) video data. The proposed methodology is based on a novel spiking neura...

BACKGROUND Osteoporosis is associated with changes in balance and physical performance and has psychosocial consequences which increase the risk of falling. Most falls occur during walking; therefore an efficient obstacle avoidance performance might contribute to a reduction in fall risk. Since it was shown that persons with osteoporosis are unstable during obstacle crossing it was hypothesized...

In this paper, we propose a new method for real time obstacle avoidance using visual information. It is based on our on-going research on vector fields and potential functions associated to successful motion planning algorithms. Specifically, this paper addresses the avoidance of dynamic obstacles, which have the property of producing instabilities in the navigation vector field associated to a...

This paper evaluates and compare three stateof-the-art collision avoidance schemes designed to operate in dynamic environments. The first one is an extension of the popular Dynamic Window approach; it is henceforth called TVDW which stands for Time-Varying Dynamic Window. The second one called NLVO builds upon the concept of Non Linear Velocity Obstacle which is a generalization of the Velocity...

This paper suggests and supports a design idea for improving dynamical navigation: adding an intermediary, adaptive obstacle representation level between perception and repeller representations. We illustrate our idea with our specific example of an adaptive obstacle representation level, which cleanly integrates into multiple existing navigation systems, treating each perceived obstacle entity...

This paper generalizes the concept of velocity obstacles [3] to obstacles moving along arbitrary trajectories. We introduce the non-linear velocity obstacle, which takes into account the shape, velocity and path curvature of the moving obstacle. The non-linear v-obstacle allows selecting a single avoidance maneuver (if one exists) that avoids any number of obstacles moving on any known trajecto...