Active Task-Space Sensing and Localization of Autonomous Vehicles

In this paper, an active line-of-sight-sensing (LOS) methodology is proposed for the docking of autonomous vehicles/robotic end-effectors. The novelty of the overall system is its applicability to cases that do not allow for the direct proximity measurement of the vehicle's pose (position and orientation). In such instances, a guidance-based technique must be employed to move the vehicle to its desired pose using corrective actions at the final stages of its motion. The objective of the proposed guidance method is, thus, to successfully minimize the systematic errors of the vehicle, accumulated after a long-range motion, while allowing it to converge within the random noise limits via a three-step procedure: active LOS realignment, determination of the new (actual) location of the vehicle, and implementation of a corrective action. The proposed system was successfully tested via simulation for a three degree-of-freedom (dof) planar robotic platform and via experiments.