Cooperative Sentry Vehicles And Differential GPS Leapfrog

As part of a project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Sandia National Laboratories Intelligent Systems and Robotics Center is developing and testing the feasibility of using a cooperative team of robotic sentry vehicles to guard a perimeter, perform a surround task, and travel extended distances. This paper describes the authors most recent activities. In particular, this paper highlights the development of a Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) leapfrog capability that allows two or more vehicles to alternate sending DGPS corrections. Using this leapfrog technique, this paper shows that a group of autonomous vehicles can travel 22.68 kilometers with a root mean square positioning error of only 5 meters