The Global Positioning System and its Use for Control of UGVs
Date: Sept. 22
Place: Broun 235
Time: 3 p.m.
David Bevly
Assistant Professor
Biography
David Bevly received his B.S. from Texas A&M University in 1995, M.S from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2001 in mechanical engineering. He joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Auburn University in 2001 as an assistant professor. Dr. Bevly's research focuses on vehicle dynamics as well as modeling and control of vehicle systems. Specifically, Dr. Bevly has developed algorithms for control of off-road vehicles and methods for identifying critical vehicle parameters using GPS and inertial sensors.
Abstract
The Global Positioning System and its Use for Control of UGVs
The Global Positioning System (GPS) has provided the ability to determine a body's position, velocity, and attitude anywhere on the surface of the globe, which has led to many advances in land, marine, and air navigation systems. With the absence of Selective Availability (SA), a GPS receiver can provide three-dimensional velocity measurements with accuracies of 3 cm/s (1, horizontal) and attitude measurements with an accuracy of 0.4 degrees. Furthermore, GPS can be augmented with inertial sensors in order to decrease GPS errors and provide measurements between GPS outputs as well as during loss of GPS signals. This talk will cover the origins of GPS, the various measurements possible using GPS, as well as the measurement limitations and new applications of GPS. One such application of GPS is autonomous control of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Both military and commercial applications of UGVs will be discussed with examples from the DARPA Grand Challenge and John Deere's Autosteer tractors. This talk will also discuss using GPS measurements in conjunction with low cost inertial sensors. While these low cost inertial sensors can be noisy and biased, integration of these sensors with GPS velocity measurements can provide high update, non-biased estimates of vehicle states for the control systems. Additionally, the inertial sensors provide data during short GPS outages.
