Stewart J. Moorehead

PVS: A system for large scale outdoor perception performance evaluation

This paper describes the motivation, design and implementation of a Perception Validation System (PVS), a system for measuring the outdoor perception performance of an autonomous vehicle. The PVS relies on using large amounts of real world data and ground truth information to quantify performance aspects such as the rate of false positive or false negative detections of an obstacle detection system. Our system relies on a relational database infrastructure to achieve a high degree of flexibility in the type of analyses it can support.

R-Gator: an unmanned utility vehicle

The R-Gator is an unmanned ground vehicle built on the John Deere 6x4 M-Gator utility vehicle chassis. The vehicle is capable of operating in urban and off-road terrain and has a large payload to carry supplies, wounded, or a marsupial robot. The R-Gator has 6 modes of operation: manual driving, teleoperation, waypoint, direction drive, playback and silent sentry. In direction drive the user specifies a direction for the robot. It will continue in that direction, avoiding obstacles, until given a new direction. Playback allows previously recorded paths, from any other mode including manual, to be played back and repeated. Silent sentry allows the engine to be turned off remotely while cameras, computers and comms remain powered by batteries. In this mode the vehicle stays quiet and stationary, collecting valuable surveillance information. The user interface consists of a wearable computer, monocle and standard video game controller. All functions of the R-Gator can be controlled by the handheld game controller, using at most 2 button presses. This easy to use user interface allows even untrained users to control the vehicle. This paper details the systems developed for the R-Gator, focusing on the novel user interface and the obstacle detection system, which supports safeguarded teleoperation as well as full autonomous operation in off-road terrain. The design for a new 4-wheel, independent suspension chassis version of the R-Gator is also presented.