Hardware Testbed for Relative Navigation of Unmanned Vehicles Using Visual Servoing

Future generations of unmanned spacecraft, aircraft, ground, and submersible vehicles will require precise relative navigation capabilities to accomplish missions such as formation operations and autonomous rendezvous and docking. The development of relative navigation sensing and control techniques is quite challenging, in part because of the difficulty of accurately simulating the physical relative navigation problems in which the control systems are designed to operate. A hardware testbed that can simulate the complex relative motion of many different relative navigation problems is being developed. This testbed simulates near-planar relative motion by using software to prescribe the motion of an unmanned ground vehicle and provides the attached sensor packages with realistic relative motion. This testbed is designed to operate over a wide variety of conditions in both indoor and outdoor environments, at short and long ranges, and its modular design allows it to easily test many different sensing and control technologies.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Monda, Mark J.

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Schaub, Hanspeter

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Woolsey, Craig A.
• Hall, Christopher D.

• Hardware Testbed
• Relative Motion Simulation
• Visual Snakes
• Visual Servoing
• Parameter Estimation
• Aerial Refueling
• Forced Perspective

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05032006-161229

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32147