VASC Seminar Announcement
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Date: Wednesday, 1/27/99
Time: 3:30-4:30
Place: Smith Hall 2nd Floor Common Area

Speaker: Gaurav Sukhatme
         Robotics Research Laboratory
         University of Southern California

Abstract: 

The 3D mobile robot localization problem is decomposed into two
stages. The attitude is estimated first and is then used for position
estimation. The innovation of our method is the incorporation of a
smoother (based on two Kalman filters) in the attitude estimation loop
that outperforms in estimate accuracy any other Kalman fiter based
technique. The proposed implementation is independent of the structure
of the vehicle or the morphology of the ground. It can easily be
transfered to another mobile platform provided that it carries an
equivalent set of sensors. I will show preliminary simulation results
on a sensor suite modeled after the NASA/JPL Rocky VII/VIII designs.

If time permits I will also talk a little bit about some of the other
projects in the lab (such as our robotic helicopter) where state
estimation techniques such as the above are being used.


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