Department Publications

quadrotor microaerial vehicles (MAVs) are simple robotic platforms with regard to their construction. In their basic form, they are no more than two counterrotating propeller pairs attached symmetrically to a rigid crosslike frame, along with the means to control the speed of each individual propeller. This symmetric design has enabled the quadrotor to become a simple but powerful vertical takeoff and landing aerial platform popular among the robotics community.

An informative digital map is a prerequisite for future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications such as lane level navigation systems. Preparing and updating such detailed digital maps by using existing methods such as surveying and image digitization is not practical due to the time and cost involved. We propose a method that statistically mines Global Positioning System (GPS) trajectory data obtained from vehicles to generate a lane level digital map of the road. The proposed method is capable of generating a digital map of the road which contains lane centerlines. The proposed method is independent of the lane width, lane parallelism and can handle lane splits and merges. In addition, a method that can be used to generate a map of lane boundaries is also presented. The proposed methods have been tested using the GPS data collected using vehicles equipped with GPS enabled mobile phones …

For high scientific return, planetary rovers need to navigate longer distances autonomously and be less dependent on Earth station. Collaboration between rovers can substantially increase the localization accuracy for all the rovers and therefore, opens up opportunity for future exploration missions. This study aims at introducing a decentralized cooperative SLAM technique for two rovers based on EKF-SLAM and FastSLAM algorithms. Several data fusion methods and motion strategies are formulated. Furthermore, a novel SLAM technique called, cooperative positioning SLAM is proposed. The results show that by fusing information, better localization accuracies can be achieved. To validate algorithms a 3D simulation environment has been developed using opensource tools.