Broad Area Colloquium for Artificial Intelligence,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics and Vision
Navigation in Unstructured Environments
Hugh Durrant-Whyte
Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR)
The University of Sydney, Australia www.acfr.usyd.edu.au
Monday, October 22, 2001, 4:15PM
Gates B01 http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
Some of the most challenging applications for robotics lie outdoors in
harsh and
unstructured environments. These include land applications such as
mining,
construction and agriculture, maritime applications such as search and
rescue, sub-sea
mining, and environment monitoring, and in air applications such as
mineral
exploration, meteorology and defence. Autonomous navigation of robotic
vehicles in
unstructured environments is probably the single most important problem
in enabling
commercial exploitation of robotics in these applications.
This presentation will describe the current state-of-the-art in
autonomous navigation
for field robotics: The advent of reliable GPS and low-cost inertial
sensing has had a
substantial impact on navigation in many outdoor applications.
Integrated GPS/INS
systems of sufficient integrity and of a price appropriate for
automation now allow
high-speed precision navigation of autonomous vehicles in land and air
applications.
However, in many situations, GPS is of limited value and terrain-aided
navigation
using exteroperceptive sensors is required. The huge progress that has
been made in
simultaneous localisation and map building (SLAM) in the past five years
has had a
major impact on what is now achievable in terrain-aided navigation. In
particular,
Kalman-filter based SLAM methods have now been demonstrated in a number
of
high-speed long-range land and air applications. New methods employing
full
Bayesian SLAM techniques have addressed structured terrain navigation
problems in
applications such as sub-sea mapping and land-vehicle operations. There
is promise
that such methods will also aid in the general area of map-building for
motion
planning and control.
The maturity of many navigation methods, together with our knowledge of
appropriate systems engineering, now suggests that we are on the eve of
many new
and exciting field automation opportunities.
About the Speaker
Hugh Durrant-Whyte received the B.Sc. (Eng.) degree (1st class honours)
in Mechanical and Nuclear
Engineering from the University of London, U.K., in 1983, the M.S.E. and
Ph.D. degrees, both in
Systems Engineering, from the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A., in
1985 and 1986, respectively.
From 1987 to 1995, he was a Senior Lecturer in Engineering Science, the
University of Oxford, U.K.
and a Fellow of Oriel College Oxford. Since July 1995 he has been
Professor of Mechatronic
Engineering at the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering,
the University of Sydney,
Australia, where he leads the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, a
Commonwealth Key Centre of
Teaching and Research. His research work focuses on automation in cargo
handling, surface and
underground mining, defence, unmanned flight vehicles and autonomous
sub-sea vehicles.
