A System for Fast Navigation of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

This report describes an autonomous mobile robot designed to navigate at high speeds over featureless terrain-- terrain which is not navigable by relying on features that are found on paved roads and highways. To this end we have developed a paradigm that we call position based navigation that relies on explicit vehicle position information from inertial and satellite instruments, to navigate. Specifically we have tackled four main areas--path tracking, which guides the robot vehicle over a pre-specified path; obstacle detection, which is responsible for bringing the vehicle to a stop from high speed when an obstacle is detected; obstacle avoidance, which is responsible for steering the vehicle around detected obstacles so as to rejoin the specific path; and computing architecture, which integrates all the capabilities into one system. We discuss the algorithms and the devices that were implemented on NavLab, a navigation testbed at Carnegie Mellon. The most notable of our results is the 11m/s speed achieved by the vehicle.