74 results about "Unmanned ground vehicle" patented technology

A quadrotor UAV including ruggedized, integral-battery, load-bearing body, two arms on the load-bearing body, each arm having two rotors, a control module mounted on the load-bearing body, a payload module mounted on the control module, and skids configured as landing gear. The two arms are replaceable with arms having wheels for ground vehicle use, with arms having floats and props for water-surface use, and with arms having pitch-controlled props for underwater use. The control module is configured to operate as an unmanned aerial vehicle, an unmanned ground vehicle, an unmanned (water) surface vehicle, and an unmanned underwater vehicle, depending on the type of arms that are attached.

Systems and methods for interruptible autonomous control of a vehicle. Autonomous control is achieved by using actuators that interact with input devices in the vehicle. The actuators (e.g., linkages) manipulate the input devices (e.g., articulation controls and drive controls, such as a throttle, brake, tie rods, steering gear, throttle lever, or accelerator) to direct the operation of the vehicle. Although operating autonomously, manual operation of the vehicle is possible following the detection of events that suggest manual control is desired. Subsequent autonomous control may be permitted, permitted after a prescribed delay, or prevented.

A motion planner for unmanned ground vehicles capable of traversing at high speeds to reach remote locations in partially known environments. The motion planner comprises a global path planner and a local path planner in communication with the global path planner. The global path planner determines a path to reach a goal location. The local motion planner revises the path determined by the global path planner to generate a motion profile accounting for constraints on the maneuverability of the unmanned ground vehicle. The motion profile provides a revised path for being traversed by the unmanned ground vehicle to reach the goal location.

The invention discloses an urban environment composition method for unmanned vehicles. Under the condition of being independent of external positioning sensors such as speedometers, GPS and inertial navigators, the trajectory tracking and environment map building of an unmanned vehicle are completed by just using few particles for 3D laser-point cloud data returned by a vehicle-mounted laser radar, thereby providing basis for the autonomous running of the unmanned ground vehicle in an unknown environment; and according to the invention, an ICP algorithm is applied to adjacent two frames of data so as to obtain a coarse estimation on the real position and posture of a vehicle, and then redundance is performed near the coarse estimation based on gaussian distribution. Although the coarse estimation is not the real position and posture of the vehicle, the coarse estimation is a high-probability area of the real position and posture of the vehicle, so that an effect of relatively accurate positioning and composition is achieved by using a small amount of particles in the process of subsequent redundance, thereby avoiding the fitting of a vehicle trajectory by using a large amount of particles in a traditional method, improving the efficiency of the algorithm, and effectively restraining a phenomenon of particle degeneracy caused by bad particle estimation.

An unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a spherical locking portion for landing on an unmanned ground vehicle is disclosed. The spherical locking portion can be the body of the unmanned aerial vehicle. Further, an unmanned ground vehicle for landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle, comprising a landing portion configured to have some of a spherical locking portion of the unmanned aerial vehicle inserted therein is disclosed.

Described are systems and methods, including computer program products for controlling an unmanned vehicle. A user controls one or more unmanned vehicles with a smart phone. The smart phone receives video stream from the unmanned vehicles, and the smart phone displays the controls from the unmanned vehicle over the video. The smart phone and the unmanned vehicle communicate wirelessly.

A wireless control system for ground-mobile robotic systems in which communication between the operator control unit and the unmanned ground vehicle is transmitted via a plurality of spectrally efficient simplex communication links.

The invention belongs to the technical field of autonomous running and visual perception, particularly relates to a multi-camera visual perception system for a UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) and aims to solve the problems of single perception algorithm, poor real-time performance, poor system expandability, inconvenience in debugging, limitation to the view field control and the like of an image processing system of the existing UGV and autonomous mobile robot. The system comprises a plurality of vehicle-mounted image processing industrial personal computers and one or a plurality of debugging monitoring computers, wherein each vehicle-mounted image processing industrial personal computer is connected with three cameras; one or a plurality of debugging monitoring computers are used for controlling the vehicle-mounted image processing industrial personal computers by a wireless router; and a control mode can be a redundancy control mode and also can be a respective control mode. In the system, an optimized visual perception method on the basis of multiple threads is adopted; and threads comprise a multi-camera video acquisition thread, a lane line perception thread, a barrier, cone bucket and signal lamp perception thread and the like. Compared with a conventional single-thread visual perception method, the optimized visual perception method on the basis of the multiple threads has higher real-time performance, stability and expandability.

Infrastructure is remotely inspected using a sensor pod such as an unmanned ground vehicle and sensors adapted to inspect a surface of the infrastructure and an unmanned aircraft adapted to interoperate with the sensor pod. The sensor pod drives along the surface of the infrastructure being inspected. A tether to the unmanned aircraft deploys and retrieves the sensor pod on the surface of the infrastructure. Electronic sensors of the sensor pod are deployable in a crevice of the surface of the infrastructure obstructed from view by the unmanned aircraft. The unmanned aircraft can comprise a radio repeater adapted to relay ground commands to the sensor pod.

The invention discloses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) combined formation cooperative control method, comprising the following steps: step 1, establishing nonlinear dynamical models of unmanned vehicles in UAV-UGV combined formation; step 2, processing the nonlinear dynamical models of a UAV and a UGV via equivalent transformation, and taking acceleration as a common control target quantity, obtaining a unified control model taking acceleration as a control input in the combined formation; step 3, establishing a ground-air combined formation structure based on a virtual pilot to obtain a stable control signal for the UAV-UGV combined formation and obtain an error model of the combined formation, wherein the control signal is acceleration obtained in step 2 as a common control target quantity; and step 4, designing a UAV-UGV combined formation controller by adopting a RBF (Radial Basis Function) network algorithm according to the control model, the error model and the acceleration serving as a control signal and a control target quantity at the same time, so that the combined formation is stable and reliable.

A Raman spectroscopy sensor integrated with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) includes a UGV having a robot arm and a camera mounted on the robot arm. A laser and telescope associated with a Raman sensor are mounted on the robot arm in such a way as to point in substantially the same direction in which the camera is pointed. A Raman spectral data acquisition and control module is mounted on the UGV and is configured to receive Raman spectral data from the telescope. A remote base station having a display and a data processing and analysis module is configured to receive data from the data acquisition and control module and to display for an operator images from the camera and information related to the Raman sensor. An autofocus system is preferably employed to automatically control telescope focus and thereby enable the Raman sensor to operate over a wide range, e.g., 0.5 m to 10 m.

The invention discloses an unmanned ground vehicle real-time track planning method based on a speed impediment. The method comprises the following steps of: 1, constructing a node n<i, j> of an anti-collision mobile search tree on the basis of the current position of an unmanned ground vehicle A; 2, constructing a reachable anti-collision speed set RAV<j>(t) of the unmanned ground vehicle A on the basis of the speed of the unmanned ground vehicle A and the speed of an obstacle; 3, calculating the optimum speed (defined as in the description) of the current planning moment through a cubic polynomial smooth controllable unit; 4, setting a speed risk factor (defined as in the description); 5, selecting a new speed, i.e., an operational character o<i, j, l> at the moment t, on the basis of the reachable speed set RAV<j>(t) and the speed risk factor; 6, constructing a branch e<j, k> on the basis of the node n<i, j> and the operational character o<i, j, l>, and obtaining a node n<i+1, k> at the moment t<i+1> or the moment t+T<S>; and 7, if the n<1+i, k> node state is in a minimum neighborhood of the target state g, completing the algorithm, and otherwise, returning to the first step for cyclic calculation. The method provided by the invention is applicable to real-time track planning under various mobile conditions such as unmanned ground vehicle lane change, crossing turning and obstacle avoiding; the real-time performance and the high precision of the planning can be ensured under the condition of existence of a plurality of dynamic obstacles; and the requirements of the planning speed and the track smoothness can be met to the maximum degree.