Autonomous Ground Vehicle

WildCat is an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). AGVs were first developed for military purposes: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Manufacturing, Search and Rescue operations, Mining, etc. WildCat will be entered in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition (IGVC) held in June 2016 at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Teams from major universities not only in the U.S., but also India, France, the UK, China, and around the world will be competing. The IGVC offers a design experience that is at the very cutting edge of engineering education. It is multidisciplinary, theory-based, hands-on, team implemented, and outcome assessed competition. It encompasses the very latest technologies impacting industrial development and taps subjects of high interest to students. The objective of the competition is to challenge students to think creatively as a team about the evolving technologies of vehicle electronic controls, sensors, computer science, robotics, and system integration throughout the design, fabrication, and field testing of autonomous intelligent mobile robots. The vehicle will compete to: 1) autonomously navigate an outdoor obstacle course as quickly as possible, keeping within the speed limit and reaching all GPS waypoints, 2) complete a course with remote (user) control, and 3) have ingenuity and uniqueness in design

Aerial-Ground collaborative sensing: Third-Person view for teleoperation

Rapid deployment and operation are key requirements in time critical application, such as Search and Rescue (SaR). Efficiently teleoperated ground robots can support first-responders in such situations. However, first-person view teleoperation is sub-optimal in difficult terrains, while a third-person perspective can drastically increase teleoperation performance. Here, we propose a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV)-based system that can autonomously provide third-person perspective to ground robots. While our approach is based on local visual servoing, it further leverages the global localization of several ground robots to seamlessly transfer between these ground robots in GPS-denied environments. Therewith one MAV can support multiple ground robots on a demand basis. Furthermore, our system enables different visual detection regimes, and enhanced operability, and return-home functionality. We evaluate our system in real-world SaR scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare