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Legged Robots have tremendous mobility, but they can also be very inefficient. These inefficiencies can be due to suboptimal control schemes, among other things. If your goal is to get from point A to point B in the least amount of time, your control scheme will be different from if your goal is to get there using the least amount of energy. In this paper, we seek a balance between these extremes by looking at both efficiency and speed. We model a walking robot as a rimless wheel, and, using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle (PMP), we find an "on-off" control for the model, and describe the switching curve between these control extremes.

Using wide-angle or omnidirectional camera lenses to increase a mobile robot's field of view introduces nonlinearity in the image due to the 'fish-eye' effect. This complicates distance perception, and increases image processing overhead. Using multiple cameras avoids the fish-eye complications, but involves using more electrical and processing power to interface them to a computer. Being able to control the orientation of a single camera, both of these disadvantages are minimized while still allowing the robot to preview a wider area. In addition, controlling the orientation allows the robot to optimize its environment perception by only looking where the most useful information can be discovered. In this paper, a technique is presented that creates a two dimensional map of objects of interest surrounding a mobile robot equipped with a panning camera on a telescoping shaft. Before attempting to negotiate a difficult path planning situation, the robot takes snapshots at different camera heights and pan angles and then produces a single map of the surrounding area. Distance perception is performed by making calibration measurements of the camera and applying coordinate transformations to project the camera's findings into the vehicle's coordinate frame. To test the system, obstacles and lines were placed to form a chicane. Several snapshots were taken with different camera orientations, and the information from each were stitched together to yield a very useful map of the surrounding area for the robot to use to plan a path through the chicane.

In this paper, the controllability of a Mecanum omnidirectional vehicle (ODV) is investigated. An adaptive drive controller is developed that guides the ODV over irregular and unpredictable driving surfaces. Using sensor fusion with appropriate filtering, the ODV gets an accurate perception of the conditions it encounters and then adapts to them to robustly control its motion. Current applications of Mecanum ODVs are designed for use on smooth, regular driving surfaces, and don't actively detect the characteristics of disturbances in the terrain. The intention of this work is to take advantage of the mobility of ODVs in environments where they weren't originally intended to be used. The methods proposed in this paper were implemented in hardware on an ODV. Experimental results did not perform as designed due to incorrect assumptions and over-simplification of the system model. Future work will concentrate on developing more robust control schemes to account for the unknown nonlinear dynamics inherent in the system.

An ultra-wideband (UWB) inter-radio ranging technology with measurement resolution of +/-0.5 ft and range up to 0.5 kilometer under certain FCC regulation was recently introduced. However, measurement data are extremely erroneous due to stochastic variables in the device and multipath radio wave reflections. This paper presents fuzzy logic tuned double tracking filters as a solution to remove misinformation in the data. The 1st tracker locates the overall center of the data in the presence of the large sporadic noise. A fuzzy logic admits only neighborhood data to a 2nd tracker which takes care of smaller deviation noise. The fuzzy neighborhood filter approach has been successfully applied to clean up the UWB radio ranges. Experimental results are shown.

We present two methods for a localization system, defined as the "angle of arrival" scheme, which computes position and heading of an autonomous vehicle system (AVS) fusing both odometry data and the measurements of the relative azimuth angles of known landmarks (in this case, reflectors of a stabilized laser/reflector system). The first method involves a combination of a geometric transformation and a recursive least squares approach with forgetting factor. The second method presented is a direct approach using variants of the Unscented Kalman filter. Both methods are examined in simulation and the results presented.