Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

Implementation Of Static Rfid Landmarks In Slam For Planogram Compliance, Brennan L. Drake

Honors College Theses

Autonomous robotic systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and exhibit robust solutions in a wide range of applications. They face many obstacles with the foremost of which being SLAM, or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, that encompasses both creation of the map of an unknown environment and localization of the robot in said environment. In this experiment, researchers propose the use of RFID tags in a semi-dynamic commercial environment to provide concrete landmarks for localization and mapping in pursuit of increased locational certainty. With this obtained, the ultimate goal of the research is to construct a robotics platform for …

Autonomous Coffee Brewing System, Lillian Gonzalez, Landon Miller, Tyler Moff, Benjamin Vitu

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Coffee consumers want an affordable, high-quality cup of coffee that takes minimal time to brew and does not excessively contribute plastic to landfills. A fully autonomous system which utilizes whole coffee beans, water, and filters to brew coffee was designed to meet this need. This system accepts user requests which specify the brew’s portion size, water temperature, and brew strength, as well as the time which the system should begin the brewing process. Occasional maintenance to empty the system’s built-in waste receptacle or resupply the system with water, coffee beans, or filters is the only user intervention required. This report …

Autonomous Navigation Of The Surface Autonomous Vehicle For Emergency Rescue (Saver), Andrew Skow

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Once dropped into the ocean, SAVER will autonomously navigate towards the Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator beacon, worn by every NASA astronaut, that emits a 121.5 MHz distress signal. Using a rotating directional loop antenna SAVER is able to detect and identify the direction of the distress beacon and navigate itself towards the signal source. The autonomous navigation system is dependent on several electrical, and mechanical systems to function properly and presents a novel systems engineering problem. Given testing limitations, NASA requires that SAVER is designed to operate indoors and with an umbilical power supply. The radio direction finding (RDF) system …

Evaluating Driving Performance Of A Novel Behavior Planning Model On Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Keyur Shah

Honors Scholar Theses

Many current algorithms and approaches in autonomous driving attempt to solve the "trajectory generation" or "trajectory following” problems: given a target behavior (e.g. stay in the current lane at the speed limit or change lane), what trajectory should the vehicle follow, and what inputs should the driving agent apply to the throttle and brake to achieve this trajectory? In this work, we instead focus on the “behavior planning” problem—specifically, should an autonomous vehicle change lane or keep lane given the current state of the system?

In addition, current theory mainly focuses on single-vehicle systems, where vehicles do not communicate with …

Vision-Based Autonomous Tracking Of A Non-Cooperative Mobile Robot By A Low-Cost Quadrotor Vehicle, Cheikhna Ahmed Tidiane Sy

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

The goal of this thesis is the detection and tracking of a ground vehicle, in particular a car-like robot, by a quadrotor. The first challenge to address in any pursuit or tracking scenario is the detection and unique identification of the target. From this first challenge, comes the need to precisely localize the target in a coordinate system that is common to the tracking and tracked vehicles. In most real-life scenarios, the tracked vehicle does not directly communicate information such as its position to the tracking one. From this fact, arises a non-cooperative constraint problem. The autonomous tracking aspect of …

Viewpoint Optimization For Autonomous Strawberry Harvesting With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Jonathon J. Sather

Master's Theses

Autonomous harvesting may provide a viable solution to mounting labor pressures in the United States' strawberry industry. However, due to bottlenecks in machine perception and economic viability, a profitable and commercially adopted strawberry harvesting system remains elusive. In this research, we explore the feasibility of using deep reinforcement learning to overcome these bottlenecks and develop a practical algorithm to address the sub-objective of viewpoint optimization, or the development of a control policy to direct a camera to favorable vantage points for autonomous harvesting. We evaluate the algorithm's performance in a custom, open-source simulated environment and observe affirmative results. Our trained …

Event And Time-Triggered Control Module Layers For Individual Robot Control Architectures Of Unmanned Agricultural Ground Vehicles, Tyler Troyer

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automation in the agriculture sector has increased to an extent where the accompanying methods for unmanned field management are becoming more economically viable. This manifests in the industry’s recent presentation of conceptual cab-less machines that perform all field operations under the high-level task control of a single remote operator. A dramatic change in the overall workflow for field tasks that historically assumed the presence of a human in the immediate vicinity of the work is predicted. This shift in the entire approach to farm machinery work provides producers increased control and productivity over high-level tasks and less distraction from operating …

Autonomous Quadrotor Collision Avoidance And Destination Seeking In A Gps-Denied Environment, Thomas C. Kirven

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

This thesis presents a real-time autonomous guidance and control method for a quadrotor in a GPS-denied environment. The quadrotor autonomously seeks a destination while it avoids obstacles whose shape and position are initially unknown. We implement the obstacle avoidance and destination seeking methods using off-the-shelf sensors, including a vision-sensing camera. The vision-sensing camera detects the positions of points on the surface of obstacles. We use this obstacle position data and a potential-field method to generate velocity commands. We present a backstepping controller that uses the velocity commands to generate the quadrotor's control inputs. In indoor experiments, we demonstrate that the …

Cooperative 3-D Map Generation Using Multiple Uavs, Andrew Erik Lawson

University Scholar Projects

This report aims to demonstrate the feasibility of building a global 3-D map from multiple UAV robots in a GPS-denied, indoor environment. Presented are the design of each robot and the reasoning behind choosing its hardware and software components, the process in which a single robot obtains a individual 3-D map entirely onboard, and lastly how the mapping concept is extended to multiple robotic agents to form a global 3-D map using a centralized server. In the latter section, this report focuses on two algorithms, Online Mapping and Map Fusion, developed to facilitate the cooperative approach. A limited selection …

Autonomous Crash Avoidance System, Brian Ujiie, Gordon Woods, Joshua Miller

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.