Autonomous Solutions has developed Chaos, a small unmanned ground vehicle with four modular running gear receptacles. Running gear attached to the vehicle can include any combination of wheels, tracks, articulated and shape-shifting tracks, and legs. Each unit is independently controllable and field changeable. This modular design allows Chaos to combine the strengths of traditional and bio-inspired locomotion. The vehicle offers unprecedented mobility potential including walking, stair climbing, clambering over obstacles, steep slope traversal and extrication. To fully exploit the vehicle's mobility potential, intelligent behaviors must be integrated to reduce the complexity of vehicle operation. Mobility behaviors include operator assisted tele-operation, adaptive gaits, obstacle characterization, traversal, and extrication. This paper will describe the design and development of Chaos including running gear and intelligent mobility behaviors.
The value of unmanned vehicles is directly related to the applications to which it can be successfully applied. Many applications exist and have been identified as suitable for unmanned vehicles, especially those involving dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous tasks. This paper will highlight applications, missions, and capabilities that have been demonstrated on the TAGS platform to date as well as future application and mission considerations. When evaluating real world applications for this type of vehicle, one must take into account and balance the complexity inherent to the control and safeguarding requirements of a large autonomous ground vehicle with the simplicity required for commercial or military field use. In addition, suitability for a particular application may be limited by the size, weight, fuel consumption, reliability, terrain crossing capability, and other abilities of a vehicle and the intelligent software system and sensors commanding it.
One of the largest factors relating to the commercial success of unmanned vehicles will be ease of use. A man machine interface (MMI) with the goal of allowing a user to easily task, monitor, and control multiple vehicles can benefit from several advancements in human machine interaction from both the research and commercial sectors. This paper focuses on the design considerations of an MMI that balances the complexity inherent to the control of multiple autonomous vehicles with the simplicity required for commercialization. It also profiles MARS, an MMI that Autonomous Solutions Incorporated has developed to facilitate the commercialization of automated test vehicles, and discusses an example applicable to the Goodyear Proving Grounds facility.
Autonomous systems have not become mainstream because of the shortcomings in the sensing of the environment and the required intelligence to react to it appropriately. Another hindrance to its maturity is the lack of a standard. Great innovations have been made in isolated applications for both sensing and intelligence, but it has been difficult to leverage them in other systems. Autonomous Solutions Inc. has built a development platform with the JPO JAUGS standard enabling rapid development of compliant hardware and software modules.
KEYWORDS: Carbon monoxide, Gas lasers, Carbon dioxide lasers, Oxygen, Carbon dioxide, Laser systems engineering, High power lasers, Data conversion, Sensors, Glasses
CO2 electrical discharge laser produce CO and oxygen by discharge dissociative of the CO2. It is well known that oxygen is deleterious to the operation of the discharge. In this paper we evaluate methods of controlling the buildup of the oxygen by gas additives as well as by various in-line and off-line catalysts.
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