Position Sensing and Situational Awareness for Robotic Vehicles

"Autonomous mobility requires improved terrain perception/understanding and trafficability/mobility situation awareness. The research program will develop, test and demonstrate three complementary products addressing pressing autonomous mobility needs.The first product is enhanced stereo vision with projected lighting to detect negative obstacles (e.g., gaps and down-steps), to assess lateral and longitudinal slope, and to detect wire fences. In Phase I we demonstrated negative obstacle detection usingshadow isolation processing with vertically-offset cameras and light sources. The prototype will operate in the visible and NIR spectra. We will specify the design for a SWIR system.The second product is a suite of on-board non-imaging sensors to measure the vehicle-terrain interaction, with software to classify the terrain type and to estimate key mobility/trafficability characteristics (e.g., maximum speed, stopping distance, etc.).In Phase I we demonstrated terrain classification and discrimination for a small set of terrain types with a limited sensor suite.The third product is an image-based terrain classification and mobility/trafficability characterization system. It computes a feature vector for each location in the image based on a unique application of "data mining" to model texture and structure. Thesoftware is "trained" to classify terrain types and objects, and to characterize the anticipated mobility/trafficability cha