Mobile robots are playing an increasingly important role in our world. Remotely operated vehicles are in everyday use for hazardous tasks such as charting and cleaning up hazardous waste spills, construction work of tunnels and high rise buildings, and underwater inspection of oil drilling platforms in the ocean. A whole host of further applications, however, beckons robots capable of autonomous operation without or with very little intervention of human operators. Such robots of the future will explore distant planets, map the ocean floor, study the flow of pollutants and carbon dioxide...

Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles describes the technology developed and the results obtained by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in the course of the DARPA Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project. The goal of this work was to equip off-road vehicles with computer-controlled, unmanned driving capabilities. The book describes contributions in the area of mobility for UGVs including: tools for assembling complex autonomous mobility systems; on-road and off-road navigation; sensing techniques; and route planning algorithms. In addition to basic mobility technology, the book...