Featured Highlights

Biologically-Inspired Terrain-Based Localization: For millions of years, our ancestors kept track of their location and orientation by looking at invariant features in far distance. The same method is used here as a means to estimate a vehicle's orientation in space, for example matching a real image (above left) to a virtual one (above right). These estimates are important because several key chassis instabilities of a  vehicle, namely sliding and rollover, require accurate knowledge of a vehicle's angular orientation in space.

The movie below has three images: the left is looking out the front of the car as we rotate the camera around. The middle picture is a rendering of the horizon area based on the approximate position of the vehicle at the test track and a digitized surface map, the right movie is the rendered scene  matched to the real picture by applying artificial rotations to the rendering system. At the bottom are three plots of roll, pitch, yaw showing agreement to within about 0.2 deg. Our ancestors on an African savannah would be proud!

See my Research page for more information. [AVI] (1 MB)

Terrain-Aware Robotics: High-speed operation of autonomous mobile robots is challenged by the impact of terrain features on the dynamics and stability of the chassis. This video shows a new tank robot platform, the Tankbot, that is currently being used to study high-speed dynamic models, human-vehicle interaction, and autonomous and driver-assist control of these vehicles. See my Research page for more information.
[AVI 15Mb] [WMV 2Mb]