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RI Seminar -- Alonzo Kelly

• WHEN: Friday, Jan 28, 1994; 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Refreshments will be served starting at 3:15 pm
• WHERE: ADAMSON WING Auditorium in Baker Hall
• SPEAKER: Alonzo Kelly

           The Robotics Institute
           Carnegie Mellon University
         

• TITLE: Systems Design of An Off Road Autonomous Navigator

ABSTRACT

This talk will overview the results to date for my PhD thesis in the area of autonomous cross country navigation. The work investigates aspects of perception, planning, localization and control using the tools of complexity and dimensional analysis, experimentation, and simulation. Ideas that emerge are implemented on the HMMWV at CMU on a proof of principle basis. The prototype has achieved unprecedented speeds of 15 km/hr and excursions of 15 km on a local off-road test site.

• Perception Complexity analysis leads to the conclusion that while the raw throughput requirement for the maintenance of safety is manageable, the traditional non-adaptive range image processing approach wastes tremendous computational bandwidth. A simple active perception algorithm is introduced which computationally stabilizes the sensor vertical field of view. It makes 20 mph off road autonomy feasible and points to techniques that may permit real time stereo perception on serial hardware.
• Planning Investigation of the impact of latencies and limits on actuator response leads to a reformulation of planning in configuration space as feedforward satisficingcontrol in actuation space. The traditional hierarchical planner-controller architecture collapses into a multi-input, multi-output feedforward controller which employs both somatic and environmental feedback and which closes this loop at relatively high update bandwidth. Steering feedforward, in particular, has been shown to be crucial to reliable navigation above 5 mph on rough terrain.

The talk will overview the subsystems of typical cross country navigators and point to the impact of high speed robust navigation on subsystem requirements.

Host:           Yangsheng Xu (xu@cs.cmu.edu)
Appointment:    Lalit Katragadda (lalit@cs.cmu.edu)