Unmanned Ground Vehicle Workshop/Lecture

Unmanned Ground Vehicle Workshop/Lecture: Basics, applications and challenges for mobile robots

Roland Lenain, Research Fellow, Irstea - Distiniguished Lecturer

From public transportation to agriculture, many fields of application may benefit from automation in the area of mobile robotics. The research in that topic is then subjected to intensive investigation in order to propose devices enabling to help people in everyday life. From driver assistance (e.g automatic parking...) up to fully autonomous vehicles (such as autonomous robots acting in hazardous environment), the targeted applications are numerous and potential benefits may be inestimable. Capabilities of mobile robots in dedicated and well known areas is largely satisfying today, even if it requires to merge competences in several domain such as mechanical engineering, electronics, and automatics. Nevertheless, in low structured or crowded environment, the performances are depreciated and safety have to be ensured. In such context, further developments in perception and control have to be done in order to propose fully efficient systems.

This event proposes an overview of the mobile robot automation problem in different configurations and with different levels of interaction with terrain. In a first session, the basics of perception and control for classical car like mobile robot, showing the current work on that topics and different kind of applications is proposed. A second session will be devoted to the coordination between several robots, rising the problem of formation control, communication and safety. In a third session, some challenging problem will be pointed out in the field of motion in harsh conditions. Some advances about high dynamics will be highlighted showing the interest of considering not only the motion accuracy, but also the integrity warranty (with respect to stability and obstacle avoidance).