1,285 research outputs found
Autonomous Personal Mobility Scooter for Multi-Class Mobility-On-Demand Service
In this paper, we describe the design and development of an autonomous personal mobility scooter that was used in public trials during the 2016 MIT Open House, for the purpose of raising public awareness and interest about autonomous vehicles. The scooter is intended to work cooperatively with other classes of autonomous vehicles such as road cars and golf cars to improve the efficacy of Mobility-on-Demand transportation solutions. The scooter is designed to be robust, reliable, and safe, while operating under prolonged durations. The flexibility in fleet expansion is shown by replicating the system architecture and sensor package that has been previously implemented in the road car and golf cars. We show that the vehicle performed robustly with small localization variance. A survey of the users shows that the public is very receptive to the concept of the autonomous personal mobility device.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) (Future Urban Mobility research program)Singapore. National Research Foundatio
Pathfinder autonomous rendezvous and docking project
Capabilities are being developed and demonstrated to support manned and unmanned vehicle operations in lunar and planetary orbits. In this initial phase, primary emphasis is placed on definition of the system requirements for candidate Pathfinder mission applications and correlation of these system-level requirements with specific requirements. The FY-89 activities detailed are best characterized as foundation building. The majority of the efforts were dedicated to assessing the current state of the art, identifying desired elaborations and expansions to this level of development and charting a course that will realize the desired objectives in the future. Efforts are detailed across all work packages in developing those requirements and tools needed to test, refine, and validate basic autonomous rendezvous and docking elements
A snake-based scheme for path planning and control with constraints by distributed visual sensors
YesThis paper proposes a robot navigation scheme using wireless visual sensors deployed in an environment.
Different from the conventional autonomous robot approaches, the scheme intends to relieve massive on-board
information processing required by a robot to its environment so that a robot or a vehicle with less intelligence can
exhibit sophisticated mobility. A three-state snake mechanism is developed for coordinating a series of sensors to
form a reference path. Wireless visual sensors communicate internal forces with each other along the reference snake
for dynamic adjustment, react to repulsive forces from obstacles, and activate a state change in the snake body from a
flexible state to a rigid or even to a broken state due to kinematic or environmental constraints. A control snake is
further proposed as a tracker of the reference path, taking into account the robot’s non-holonomic constraint and
limited steering power. A predictive control algorithm is developed to have an optimal velocity profile under robot
dynamic constraints for the snake tracking. They together form a unified solution for robot navigation by distributed
sensors to deal with the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a robot and to react to dynamic changes in advance.
Simulations and experiments demonstrate the capability of a wireless sensor network to carry out low-level control
activities for a vehicle.Royal Society, Natural Science Funding Council (China
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
Toward Dynamical Sensor Management for Reactive Wall-following
We propose a new paradigm for reactive wallfollowing by a planar robot taking the form of an actively steered sensor model that augments the robot’s motion dynamics. We postulate a foveated sensor capable of delivering third-order infinitesimal (range, tangent, and curvature) data at a point along a wall (modeled as an unknown smooth plane curve) specified by the angle of the ray from the robot’s body that first intersects it. We develop feedback policies for the coupled (point or unicycle) sensorimotor system that drive the sensor’s foveal angle as a function of the instantaneous infinitesimal data, in accord with the trade-off between a desired standoff and progress-rate as the wall’s curvature varies unpredictably in the manner of an unmodeled noise signal. We prove that in any neighborhood within which the thirdorder infinitesimal data accurately predicts the local “shape” of the wall, neither robot will ever hit it. We empirically demonstrate with comparative physical studies that the new active sensor management strategy yields superior average tracking performance and avoids catastrophic collisions or wall losses relative to the passive sensor variant.
This work was supported by AFOSR MURI FA9550–10–1−0567.
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