Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
The International Journal of Robotics Research
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (OnlineFirst PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by He, R.
Right arrow Articles by Roy, N.
Social Bookmarking
 Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Article

On the Design and Use of a Micro Air Vehicle to Track and Avoid Adversaries

Ruijie He1*, Abraham Bachrach1, Michael Achtelik2, Alborz Geramifard1, Daniel Gurdan2, Samuel Prentice1, Jan Stumpf2, and Nicholas Roy1

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
2 Ascending Technologies GmbH, Stockdorf, Germany

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ruijie{at}mit.edu.


   Abstract

The MAV '08 competition focused on the problem of using air and ground vehicles to locate and rescue hostages being held in a remote building. To execute this mission, a number of technical challenges were addressed, including designing the micro air vehicle (MAV), using the MAV to geo-locate ground targets, and planning the motion of ground vehicles to reach the hostage location without detection. In this paper, we describe the complete system designed for the MAV '08 competition, and present our solutions to three technical challenges that were addressed within this system. First, we summarize the design of our MAV, focusing on the navigation and sensing payload. Second, we describe the vision and state estimation algorithms used to track ground features, including stationary obstacles and moving adversaries, from a sequence of images collected by the MAV. Third, we describe the planning algorithm used to generate motion plans for the ground vehicles to approach the hostage building undetected by adversaries; these adversaries are tracked by the MAV from the air. We examine different variants of a search algorithm and describe their performance under different conditions. Finally, we provide results of our system's performance during the mission execution.

First published on October 1, 2009
The International Journal of Robotics Research 2009, doi:10.1177/0278364909348805


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?