The control of field robots in varying and uncertain terrain conditions presents a challenge for autonomous navigation. Online estimation of the wheel-terrain slip characteristics is essential for generating the accurate control predictions necessary for tracking trajectories in off-road environments. Receding horizon estimation (RHE) provides a powerful framework for constrained estimation, and when combined with receding horizon control (RHC), yields an adaptive optimisation-based control method. Presently, such methods assume slip to be constant over the estimation horizon, while our proposed structured blocking approach relaxes this assumption, resulting in improved state and parameter estimation. We demonstrate and compare the performance of this method in simulation, and propose an overlapping-block strategy to ameliorate some of the limitations encountered in applying noise-blocking in a receding horizon estimation and control (RHEC) context.
It was observed in @cite_23 that the techniques in @cite_30 suffer from decreased performance as vehicle speed increases, motivating development of a mixed backstepping kinematic and dynamic observer to improve observation of the side slip effects. This new framework was reported to improve tracking performance at the maximal velocity of 5 m s.
@cite_30 @cite_23
2132707875 2061055677 2046752030 231932267
Automation in outdoor applications (farming, surveillance, military activities, etc.) requires highly accurate control of mobile robots, at high speed, although they are moving on low-grip terrain. To meet such expectations, advanced control laws accounting for natural ground specificities (mainly sliding effects) must be derived. In previous work, adaptive and predictive control algorithms, based on an extended kinematic representation, have been proposed. Satisfactory experimental results have been reported (accurate to within ±10 cm, whatever the grip conditions), but at limited velocity (below 3 m·s-1). Nevertheless, simulations reveal that control accuracy is decreased when vehicle speed is increased (up to 10 m·s-1). In particular, oscillations are observed at curvature transition. This drawback is due to delays in sideslip angle estimation, unavoidable at high speed because only an extended kinematic representation was used. In this paper, a mixed backstepping kinematic and dynamic observer is designed to improve observation of these variables: the slow-varying data are still estimated from a kinematic representation, which is then injected into a dynamic observer to supply reactive and reliable sliding variable (namely sideslip angle) estimation, without increasing the noise level. The algorithm is evaluated via advanced simulations (coupling Adams and MatLab software) investigating high-speed capabilities. Actual experiments at lower speed (experimental platform maximum velocity) demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. It has great significance to acquire vehicle speed for active safety system. This paper presents a methodology for identifying vehicle speed by obtaining a sparse optical flow from image sequences. Distinct corners can be detected by Harris corner detector after image enhancement. Then, Lucas-Kanade method for optical flow calculation is utilized to match the sparse feature set of one frame on the consecutive frame. In order to improve the accuracy of optical flow, RANSAC algorithm is introduced to optimize the matched corners. Finally, the vehicle speed can be determined by averaging all the speeds estimated by every optimized matched corner. The results of field test indicated that the computation time of the developed method to execute for one time was 59ms, and the mean error of speed estimation relative to the measurement of GPS was 0.121 m s. The developed method can achieve satisfying performance, such as accuracy and output frequency. This paper presents a novel framework for tracking thousands of vehicles in high resolution, low frame rate, multiple camera aerial videos. The proposed algorithm avoids the pitfalls of global minimization of data association costs and instead maintains multiple object-centric associations for each track. Representation of object state in terms of many to many data associations per track is proposed and multiple novel constraints are introduced to make the association problem tractable while allowing sharing of detections among tracks. Weighted hypothetical measurements are introduced to better handle occlusions, mis-detections and split or merged detections. A two-frame differencing method is presented which performs simultaneous moving object detection in both. Two novel contextual constraints of vehicle following model, and discouragement of track intersection and merging are also proposed. Extensive experiments on challenging, ground truthed data sets are performed to show the feasibility and superiority of the proposed approach. Results of quantitative comparison with existing approaches are presented, and the efficacy of newly introduced constraints is experimentally established. The proposed algorithm performs better and faster than global, 1---1 data association methods. Coping with dynamic changes in traffic volume has been the object of recent publications. Recently, a method was proposed, which is capable of learning in non-stationary scenarios via an approach to detect context changes. For particular scenarios such as the traffic control one, the performance of that method is better than a greedy strategy, as well as other reinforcement learning approaches, such as Q-learning and Prioritized Sweeping. The goal of the present paper is to assess the feasibility of applying the above mentioned approach in a more realistic scenario, implemented by means of a microscopic traffic simulator. We intend to show that to use of context detection is suitable to deal with noisy scenarios where non-stationarity occurs not only due to the changing volume of vehicles, but also because of the random behavior of drivers in what regards the operational task of driving (e.g. deceleration probability). The results confirm the tendencies already detected in the previous paper, although here the increase in noise makes the learning task much more difficult, and the correct separation of contexts harder.