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Preface to the papers from the 1st IFAC workshop on intelligent autonomous vehicles
ControlEng.Practice,Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 271, 1994
Pergamon
C o p y ~ • 1994 I~aevier S¢ien~ Ltd Printed in Oteat Britain. All righ~ re.fred 0967-0661/94 $6.00 + 0.00
PREFACE TO THE PAPERS FROM THE 1st IFAC WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES D. Charnley Advanced Systems Research Group, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of SoWhampton, Southampton, UK
in its infancy. A review of open issues in sensing, planning and system architectures served to illustrate that there remain many important and largely unresolved problems in all areas of IAV research.
The papers presented in this Special Section of Control Engineering Practice have been chosen to represent some of the highlights of the First International Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, held in Southampton, England in April 1993. The workshop was initiated by the newlyformed IFAC Working Group on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs), in recognition of the ever-growing interest in vehiodar autonomy in both industry and academia. Its aim was to bring together the diverse technological areas r u n , mental to the development and design of land-based, aerospace and undersea robotic systems.
Two special sessions were held on vehicle case studies. Interestingly, these studies almost all described land-based IAV systems, for which even such fundamental issues as locomotion often dominate, except in the most benign of environments. Of the papers selected for this issue of Control Engineering Pract/ce, that of Halme et al., "Terrain
adaptive motions and free gait of a six-legged walking machine" exemplifies the current status of
The breadth of related research topics was clearly evident from the papers submitted to the workshop. Well over a hnnd:ed high-quality abstracts were reviewed by the international programme committee, of which 94 were selected for presentation, either as full papers or in poster format. Attendance at the event was originally confined to those actively participating, but high demand from the IAV commtmity led to an unforeseen but very satisfying growth in the number of attendees to over 150. Equally encouraging was the world-wide interest generated by the workshop; research groups from Western Europe were well-represented, and over 25 participants came from Eastern Europe, the USA and Canada, Scandinavia and Japan. In the three and a half days of this international meeting, over 70 papers were presented, many of them originating from international co-operative ventures such as the Esprit and PROMETHEUS research programs.
terrain-adaptive mobile robots. Sensing and control formed predominant themes of the workshop, with sessions on navigation and guidance providing a natural bridge between them. The papers published here are intended to reflect the application of control methodology to vehicle navigation and control; several illustrations of vehicular systems operating in complex real-world environments have been chosen. Intelligent control merited a paper session in .its own right; fuzzy logic methods in particular are being applied to all aspects of navigation and control. The three papers on fuzzy logic chosen for this issue of Control Engineering Praclice are representative of the considerable research interest in this area, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, even in the demanding sixdegree-of-freedom undersea scenario. The choice of papers for this issue was influenced also by a wish to include representative examples of implemented IAV systems and subsystems. All the selected papers describe operational vehicles on which algorithms and architectures have been evaluated. It is hoped, therefore, that these papers give an up-to-date impression of the demanding control problems currently addressed by designers of intelligent autonomous vehicles.
The workshop opened with an invited talk from Professor Mike Brady of the University of Oxford. In revisiting some of the notable achievements of the past twenty years' research in mobile robotics, he took the opportunity to advise caution about the claims we should make for vehicle autonomy. He stressed that the design of fully autonomous vehicle systems, that can deal with uncertain, incomplete and dynamic real-world knowledge is still very much 271
Pergamon
C o p y ~ • 1994 I~aevier S¢ien~ Ltd Printed in Oteat Britain. All righ~ re.fred 0967-0661/94 $6.00 + 0.00
PREFACE TO THE PAPERS FROM THE 1st IFAC WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES D. Charnley Advanced Systems Research Group, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of SoWhampton, Southampton, UK
in its infancy. A review of open issues in sensing, planning and system architectures served to illustrate that there remain many important and largely unresolved problems in all areas of IAV research.
The papers presented in this Special Section of Control Engineering Practice have been chosen to represent some of the highlights of the First International Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, held in Southampton, England in April 1993. The workshop was initiated by the newlyformed IFAC Working Group on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs), in recognition of the ever-growing interest in vehiodar autonomy in both industry and academia. Its aim was to bring together the diverse technological areas r u n , mental to the development and design of land-based, aerospace and undersea robotic systems.
Two special sessions were held on vehicle case studies. Interestingly, these studies almost all described land-based IAV systems, for which even such fundamental issues as locomotion often dominate, except in the most benign of environments. Of the papers selected for this issue of Control Engineering Pract/ce, that of Halme et al., "Terrain
adaptive motions and free gait of a six-legged walking machine" exemplifies the current status of
The breadth of related research topics was clearly evident from the papers submitted to the workshop. Well over a hnnd:ed high-quality abstracts were reviewed by the international programme committee, of which 94 were selected for presentation, either as full papers or in poster format. Attendance at the event was originally confined to those actively participating, but high demand from the IAV commtmity led to an unforeseen but very satisfying growth in the number of attendees to over 150. Equally encouraging was the world-wide interest generated by the workshop; research groups from Western Europe were well-represented, and over 25 participants came from Eastern Europe, the USA and Canada, Scandinavia and Japan. In the three and a half days of this international meeting, over 70 papers were presented, many of them originating from international co-operative ventures such as the Esprit and PROMETHEUS research programs.
terrain-adaptive mobile robots. Sensing and control formed predominant themes of the workshop, with sessions on navigation and guidance providing a natural bridge between them. The papers published here are intended to reflect the application of control methodology to vehicle navigation and control; several illustrations of vehicular systems operating in complex real-world environments have been chosen. Intelligent control merited a paper session in .its own right; fuzzy logic methods in particular are being applied to all aspects of navigation and control. The three papers on fuzzy logic chosen for this issue of Control Engineering Praclice are representative of the considerable research interest in this area, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, even in the demanding sixdegree-of-freedom undersea scenario. The choice of papers for this issue was influenced also by a wish to include representative examples of implemented IAV systems and subsystems. All the selected papers describe operational vehicles on which algorithms and architectures have been evaluated. It is hoped, therefore, that these papers give an up-to-date impression of the demanding control problems currently addressed by designers of intelligent autonomous vehicles.
The workshop opened with an invited talk from Professor Mike Brady of the University of Oxford. In revisiting some of the notable achievements of the past twenty years' research in mobile robotics, he took the opportunity to advise caution about the claims we should make for vehicle autonomy. He stressed that the design of fully autonomous vehicle systems, that can deal with uncertain, incomplete and dynamic real-world knowledge is still very much 271