Military and security operations often require that participants move as quickly as possible, while avoiding harm. Humans judge how fast they can drive, how sharply they can turn and how hard they can brake, based on a subjective assessment of vehicle handling, which results from responsiveness to driving commands, ride quality, and prior experience in similar conditions. Vehicle handling is a ...

Virginia Tech is currently developing a new autonomous vehicle as a research platform. This vehicle is being used to investigate techniques in autonomous landmine/UXO detection. In addition, it was entered in the 2000 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. This vehicle senses its surroundings using two (non-stereo) color CCD cameras, a SICK laser range finder, and wheel encoders. The cameras g...

In this paper, a two-echelon cooperated routing problem for the ground vehicle (GV) and its carried unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is investigated, where the GV travels on the road network and its UAV travels in areas beyond the road to visit a number of targets unreached by the GV. In contrast to the classical two-echelon routing problem, the UAV has to launch and land on the GV frequently to c...

Sensory perception for unmanned ground vehicle navigation has received great attention from the robotics community. However, sensors mounted on the vehicle are regularly viewpoint impaired. A vehicle navigating at high speeds in offroad environments may be unable to react to negative obstacles such as large holes and cliffs. One approach to address this problem is to complement the sensing capa...

In this paper, online multisensor data fusion algorithm using CORBA event channel is proposed, in order to deal with simplifying problem in sensor registration and fusion for vehicle’s state estimation. The networked based navigation concept for Autonomous Ground Vehicle (AGV) using several sensors is presented. A simulation of various application scenarios are considered by choosing several pa...

This thesis attempts to develop features identification and tracking system for an autonomous ground vehicle by focusing on four fundamental tasks: Motion detection, object tracking, scene recognition, and object detection and recognition. For motion detection, we combined the background subtraction method using the mixture of Gaussian models and the optical flow to highlight any moving objects...