The Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliances (RCTA) program, which ran from 2001 to 2009, was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and managed by General Dynamics Robotic Systems. The alliance brought together a team of government, industrial, and academic institutions to address research and development required to enable the deployment of future military unmanned ground vehicle syst...

In order for robots to efficiently navigate in real-world environments, they need to be able to classify and characterize terrain for safe navigation. The majority of techniques for terrain classification is predominantly based on using visual features. However, as vision-based approaches are severely affected by appearance variations and occlusions, relying solely on them incapacitates the abi...

This paper explores how a ‘learning’ algorithm can be added to UGV’s by giving it the ability to test the terrain through ‘feeling’ using incorporated sensors, which would in turn increase its situational awareness. Once the conditions are measured the system will log the results and a database can be built up of terrain types and their properties (terrain classification), therefore when it com...

Terrain classification in robotics has heavily focused on determining a region for traversal, while also labeling obstacles. Our work attempts to expand this essentially binary viewpoint and to use terrain classifiers as an indicator for different system dynamics. By learning multiple models of the system dynamics, the robot is able to assess alternative paths based on traversal costs of differ...

LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) for terrain and land surveying has contributed to many environmental, engineering and civil applications. However, the analysis of Digital Surface Models (DSMs) from complex LIDAR data is still challenging especially for highly sloped landscapes. Commonly, the first task to investigate LIDAR data point clouds is to separate ground and object points as a prepa...

 SIR-C quad-pol MLC data acquired in 1994 and ALOS PALSAR quad-pol and dual pol SLC data acquired in 2006 and 2007 over several Indian sites have been processed using PolSARpro software for classification of various land features. The land features include ocean, clear water, settlements, agriculture fields, arid lands, grown and young forest, hilly terrain, mangrove forest, etc. Both unsuperv...

Current image quality approaches are designed to assess the utility of single band images by trained image analysts. While analysts today are certainly involved in the exploitation of spectral imagery, automated tools are generally used as aids in the analysis and offer hope in the future of significantly reducing the analysis timeline and analyst work load. Thus, there is a recognized need for...

This paper describes the design, implementation, and experimental results of a navigation system for planetary rovers called Terrain Adaptive Navigation (TANav). This system was designed to enable greater access to and more robust operations within terrains of widely varying slippage. The system achieves this goal by using onboard stereo cameras to remotely classify surrounding terrain, predict...