Research

Vehicle Safeguarding :: Previous Research :: Publications

Autonomous Tractor

Vehicle Safeguarding

I am currently working with my advisor Tony Stentz on autonomous navigation and safeguarding of outdoor vehicles, such as an agricultural tractor. Generally, these systems make predictions of upcoming terrain to choose whether it is safe to proceed, but this is difficult in vegetation or slippery terrain where the ground height or friction cannot be sensed directly using forward looking sensors such as cameras or laser range-finders. I am interested in closing the loop around these predictions by letting the vehicle automatically learn the mapping from forward sensor information to quantities of interest such as ground height as the vehicle experiences the world. See my publications below for more information.

The autonomous tractor project is described more on the following pages, but the information there is quite out of date: RI project page, REC project page, and Tony's project page. I work at the National Robotics Engineering Consortium and my RI homepage is here.

If you're within CMU, you can view my internal page.

JPL Mars Yard

Previous Research

I spent the summer of 2001 working with Larry Matthies at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory evaluating and improving Visual Odometry. This technique uses stereo cameras to track features across frames to find the motion of the rover. This is important for environments such as Mars, where there is no GPS, and wheel odometry may be incorrect due to wheel slip. The Visual Odometry system is currently running on the Mars rovers.

It was a great experience, and as shown to the right, I got to hang out with (test) rovers on (simulated) Mars.

Publications

C. Wellington, A. Courville, and A. Stentz, "Interacting Markov Random Fields for Simultaneous Terrain Modeling and Obstacle Detection", Robotics Science and Systems Conference, 2005.
Abstract PDF Bibtex

C. Wellington and A. Stentz, "Online Adaptive Rough-Terrain Navigation in Vegetation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2004.
Abstract PDF Bibtex

C. Wellington and A. Stentz, "Learning Predictions of the Load-Bearing Surface for Autonomous Rough-Terrain Navigation in Vegetation", Field and Service Robotics Conference (FSR), 2003.
Abstract PDF Bibtex

A. Stentz, C. Dima, C. Wellington, H. Herman, and D. Stager, "A System for Semi-Autonomous Tractor Operations", Autonomous Robots, 2002.
Abstract Bibtex

C. Wellington, R. Bock, and B. Maxwell, "Combining Color and Edge Information to Find Door Locations in an Image", SPIE Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision, 1999.
Abstract Bibtex