Maris Juberts

Status report on next-generation LADAR for driving unmanned ground vehicles

The U.S. Department of Defense has initiated plans for the deployment of autonomous robotic vehicles in various tactical military operations starting in about seven years. Most of these missions will require the vehicles to drive autonomously over open terrain and on roads which may contain traffic, obstacles, military personnel as well as pedestrians. Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) must therefore be able to detect, recognize and track objects and terrain features in very cluttered environments. Although several LADAR sensors exist today which have successfully been implemented and demonstrated to provide somewhat reliable obstacle detection and can be used for path planning and selection, they tend to be limited in performance, are effected by obscurants, and are quite large and expensive. In addition, even though considerable effort and funding has been provided by the DOD R&D community, nearly all of the development has been for target detection (ATR) and tracking from various flying platforms. Participation in the Army and DARPA sponsored UGV programs has helped NIST to identify requirement specifications for LADAR to be used for on and off-road autonomous driving. This paper describes the expected requirements for a next generation LADAR for driving UGVs and presents an overview of proposed LADAR design concepts and a status report on current developments in scannerless Focal Plane Array (FPA) LADAR and advanced scanning LADAR which may be able to achieve the stated requirements. Examples of real-time range images taken with existing LADAR prototypes will be presented.

Intelligent system control: A unified approach and applications

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the hierarchical real-time control systems reference model architecture aiming at designing and developing intelligent control for large and complex engineering systems. Real time control system (RCS) is based on several general and fundamental principles of engineering systems. This chapter presents the methodology, or the development process, to apply RCS to the system control. The RCS reference model architecture and methodology provide a simple and systematic mechanism to obtain, describe, and organize domain operational knowledge. The single-node concept improves human understanding of the design. The process-template-based implementation approach gives a systemwide consistent interfacing infrastructure, freeing the developers from the infrastructural issues and allowing them to concentrate on individual component technology. The RCS methodology prescribes modular real-time simulation and animation functions. This facilitates early concept visualization and rapid prototyping that, in turn, reduces development cost. This chapter describes three intelligent systems division (ISD) case study control systems. The case study descriptions demonstrate the richness of the RCS architecture, from a generic process-template-based system to real-time rich sensing and planning systems. The case studies also describe the evolution and the road map of the methodology, from base-class models to process and interface definitions and to the plan of fully exercising the methodology.

Entity knowledge model supporting intelligent systems

Intelligent systems operate in uncertain and complex environments. In order to achieve their goals, these systems require rich and updated knowledge about the environment and about their own capabilities to enable proper decision making processes. A critical subset of the required knowledge is entity, which models the physical environment. This paper provides a generic and systematic model for the entities.