Ground Vehicle Control at NIST: from Teleoperation to Autonomy

NIST is applying their Real-time Control System (RCS) methodology for control of ground vehicles for both the U.S. Army Research Lab, as part of the DOD's Unmanned Ground Vehicles program, and for the Department of Transportation's Intelligent Vehicle / Highway Systems (IVHS) program. The actuated vehicle, a military HMMWV , has motors for steering, brake, throttle, etc. and sensors for the dashboard gauges. For military operations, the vehicle has two modes of operation: a teleoperation mode - where an operator remotely controls the vehicle over an RF communications network; and a semi-autonomous mode called retro-traverse - where the control system uses an inertial navigation system to steer the vehicle along a prerecorded path. For the IVHS work, intelligent vision processing elements replace the human teleoperator to achieve autonomous, visually guided road following.