This paper investigates the air–ground cooperative time-varying formation-tracking control problem of a heterogeneous cluster system composed an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and aerial (UAV). Initially, structure UAV–UGV formation-control is analyzed from perspective combat system. Next, based on motion relationship between in relative coordinate system, model them established, which can clear...

Autonomous ground vehicle navigation requires the integration of many technologies such as path planning, position and orientation sensing, vehicle control, and obstacle avoidance. The work presented here focuses on the control of a non-holonomic ground vehicle as it tracks a given path. A new path tracking technique called ‘vector pursuit’ is presented. This new technique is based on the theor...

The annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) allows for students on the undergraduate and graduate level to design, build, and test intelligent ground vehicles in a competitive environment. The IGVC is a three part competition consisting of a vehicle design, autonomous navigation through an unknown obstacle course and an interoperability challenge that requires the utilization of th...

Introduction: One of NASA’s current objectives is to send humans to an asteroid. To make this goal feasible, it is critical to perform in-situ measurements to characterize these surfaces in order to understand the environment that astronauts, vehicles, and equipment will be exposed to while exploring. Currently, there is very little knowledge about the geophysical and geotechnical properties of...

This paper describes an absolute localisation method for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) if GPS is unavailable for the vehicle. The basic idea is to combine an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to the ground vehicle and use it as an external sensor platform to achieve an absolute localisation of the robotic team. Beside the discussion of the rather naive method directly using the GPS position of t...

In March 2015, a ground vehicle gravimetry test was implemented in eastern Changsha to assess the repeatability and accuracy of ground vehicle SINS/GNSS gravimeter-SGA-WZ02. The gravity system developed by NUDT consisted of a Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS), a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) remote station on test vehicle, a GNSS static master station on the ground, and a ...

Chrono::Vehicle is a module of the open-source multi-physics simulation package Chrono, aimed at modeling, simulation, and visualization of wheeled and tracked ground vehicle multibody systems. Its software architecture and design was dictated by the desire to provide an expeditious and user-friendly mechanism for assembling complex vehicle models, while leveraging the underlying Chrono modelin...