Thursday, May 7, 2015

Grizzlies Belong in the Woods

Spring has sprung and our Grizzly is on the prowl again.  The image on the right shows the Grizzly autonomously repeating a route using vision at 3.5 m/s through a wooded area.  This is easier said than done as there are a multitude of hazards that must be avoided.  We demonstrate the route we want to drive to the robot.  Then, our path-tracking controller gradually increases speed in sections of the path where it can keep errors within user-defined bounds; it therefore learns to drive quickly while keeping path-tracking errors very low.