2,642 research outputs found
Autonomous Navigation System for a Delivery Drone
The use of delivery services is an increasing trend worldwide, further
enhanced by the COVID pandemic. In this context, drone delivery systems are of
great interest as they may allow for faster and cheaper deliveries. This paper
presents a navigation system that makes feasible the delivery of parcels with
autonomous drones. The system generates a path between a start and a final
point and controls the drone to follow this path based on its localization
obtained through GPS, 9DoF IMU, and barometer. In the landing phase,
information of poses estimated by a marker (ArUco) detection technique using a
camera, ultra-wideband (UWB) devices, and the drone's software estimation are
merged by utilizing an Extended Kalman Filter algorithm to improve the landing
precision. A vector field-based method controls the drone to follow the desired
path smoothly, reducing vibrations or harsh movements that could harm the
transported parcel. Real experiments validate the delivery strategy and allow
to evaluate the performance of the adopted techniques. Preliminary results
state the viability of our proposal for autonomous drone delivery.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures, extended version of an paper published at the
XXIII Brazilian Congress of Automatica, entitled "Desenvolvimento de um drone
aut\^onomo para tarefas de entrega de carga
Towards Full Automated Drive in Urban Environments: A Demonstration in GoMentum Station, California
Each year, millions of motor vehicle traffic accidents all over the world
cause a large number of fatalities, injuries and significant material loss.
Automated Driving (AD) has potential to drastically reduce such accidents. In
this work, we focus on the technical challenges that arise from AD in urban
environments. We present the overall architecture of an AD system and describe
in detail the perception and planning modules. The AD system, built on a
modified Acura RLX, was demonstrated in a course in GoMentum Station in
California. We demonstrated autonomous handling of 4 scenarios: traffic lights,
cross-traffic at intersections, construction zones and pedestrians. The AD
vehicle displayed safe behavior and performed consistently in repeated
demonstrations with slight variations in conditions. Overall, we completed 44
runs, encompassing 110km of automated driving with only 3 cases where the
driver intervened the control of the vehicle, mostly due to error in GPS
positioning. Our demonstration showed that robust and consistent behavior in
urban scenarios is possible, yet more investigation is necessary for full scale
roll-out on public roads.Comment: Accepted to Intelligent Vehicles Conference (IV 2017
Cooperative AUV Navigation using a Single Maneuvering Surface Craft
In this paper we describe the experimental implementation of an online algorithm for cooperative localization of submerged autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) supported by an autonomous surface craft. Maintaining accurate localization of an AUV is difficult because electronic signals, such as GPS, are highly attenuated by water. The usual solution to the problem is to utilize expensive navigation sensors to slow the rate of dead-reckoning divergence. We investigate an alternative approach that utilizes the position information of a surface vehicle to bound the error and uncertainty of the on-board position estimates of a low-cost AUV. This approach uses the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) acoustic modem to exchange vehicle location estimates while simultaneously estimating inter-vehicle range. A study of the system observability is presented so as to motivate both the choice of filtering approach and surface vehicle path planning. The first contribution of this paper is to the presentation of an experiment in which an extended Kalman filter (EKF) implementation of the concept ran online on-board an OceanServer Iver2 AUV while supported by an autonomous surface vehicle moving adaptively. The second contribution of this paper is to provide a quantitative performance comparison of three estimators: particle filtering (PF), non-linear least-squares optimization (NLS), and the EKF for a mission using three autonomous surface craft (two operating in the AUV role). Our results indicate that the PF and NLS estimators outperform the EKF, with NLS providing the best performance.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N000140711102)United States. Office of Naval Research. Multidisciplinary University Research InitiativeSingapore. National Research FoundationSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Center for Environmental Sensing and Monitorin
Analysing the effects of sensor fusion, maps and trust models on autonomous vehicle satellite navigation positioning
This thesis analyzes the effects of maps, sensor fusion and trust models on autonomous vehicle satellite positioning. The aim is to analyze the localization improvements that commonly used sensors, technologies and techniques provide to autonomous vehicle positioning. This thesis includes both survey of localization techniques used by other research and their localization accuracy results as well as experimentation where the effects of different technologies and techniques on lateral position accuracy are reviewed. The requirements for safe autonomous driving are strict and while the performance of the average global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver alone may not prove to be adequate enough for accurate positioning, it may still provide valuable position data to an autonomous vehicle. For the vehicle, this position data may provide valuable information about the absolute position on the globe, it may improve localization accuracy through sensor fusion and it may act as an independent data source for sensor trust evaluation. Through empirical experimentation, the effects of sensor fusion and trust functions with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) on GNSS lateral position accuracy are measured and analyzed. The experimentation includes the measurements from both consumer-grade devices mounted on a traditional automobile and high-end devices of a truck that is capable of autonomous driving in a monitored environment. The maps and LIDAR measurements used in the experiments are prone to errors and are taken into account in the analysis of the data
Enhancing State Estimator for Autonomous Race Car : Leveraging Multi-modal System and Managing Computing Resources
This paper introduces an innovative approach to enhance the state estimator
for high-speed autonomous race cars, addressing challenges related to
unreliable measurements, localization failures, and computing resource
management. The proposed robust localization system utilizes a Bayesian-based
probabilistic approach to evaluate multimodal measurements, ensuring the use of
credible data for accurate and reliable localization, even in harsh racing
conditions. To tackle potential localization failures during intense racing, we
present a resilient navigation system. This system enables the race car to
continue track-following by leveraging direct perception information in
planning and execution, ensuring continuous performance despite localization
disruptions. Efficient computing resource management is critical to avoid
overload and system failure. We optimize computing resources using an efficient
LiDAR-based state estimation method. Leveraging CUDA programming and GPU
acceleration, we perform nearest points search and covariance computation
efficiently, overcoming CPU bottlenecks. Real-world and simulation tests
validate the system's performance and resilience. The proposed approach
successfully recovers from failures, effectively preventing accidents and
ensuring race car safety.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.1223
Using a single band GNSS receiver to improve relative positioning in autonomous cars
We show how the combination of a single band global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receiver, standard automotive level inertial measurement unit (IMU), and wheel speed sensors, can be used for relative positioning with accuracy on a decimeter scale. It is realized without the need for expensive dual band receivers, base stations or long initialization times. This is implemented and evaluated in a natural driving environment against a reference systems and against two simple base line systems; one using only IMU and wheel speed sensors, the other also adding basic GNSS. The proposed solution provides substantially slower error growth than either of the two base line systems
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