Marcel Bergerman

Near Earth Autonomy Inc.

Rotorcraft operating in unprepared locations must be capable of safe flight in the presence of unmapped obstacles and absence of GPS, and must be able to quickly and reliably assess a potential landing zone's suitability for landing. This paper presents technologies that address these needs and the result of their application to an actual unmanned...

Unmanned cargo delivery to combat outposts will inevitably involve operations in degraded visual environments (DVE). When DVE occurs, the aircraft autonomy system needs to be able to function regardless of the obscurant level. In 2014, Near Earth Autonomy established a baseline perception system for autonomous rotorcraft operating in clear air cond...

In this paper, the effects of wheel slip estimation and compensation of trajectory tracking for orchard applications were investigated. A slippage estimator was developed and adapted into a car-like robot model. Steering and velocity commands were generated using a model-based control approach. The whole system was implemented and tested on an auto...

Robotics for agriculture and forestry (A&F ) represents the ultimate application of one of our society’s latest and most advanced innovations to its most ancient and important industries. Over the course of history, mechanization and automation increased crop output several orders of magnitude, enabling a geometric growth in population and an incre...

In this paper we propose a novel model-based control method for an autonomous agricultural vehicle that operates in tree fruit orchards. The method improves path following performance by taking into account the vehicle’s motion model, including the effects of wheel sideslip, to calculate speed and steering commands. It also generates turn paths tha...

Agricultural robotics is an area of growing interest with the potential to bring about profound economic and social benefits. Interest in this area is motivated by the need to improve the industries and processes that feed the planet. Autonomous systems are currently being developed for tasks such as pruning, thinning, harvesting, mowing, targeted...

The Navy and Marine Corps will increasingly need to operate unmanned air vehicles from ships at sea. Fused multi-sensor systems are desirable to ensure these operations are highly reliable under the most demanding at-sea conditions, particularly in degraded visual environments. The US Navy Sea-Based Automated Launch & Recovery System (SALRS) progra...

The growing interest of rotary wing UAVs, for military and civilian applications, has encouraged designers to consider miniaturized configurations, more efficient in terms of endurance, payload capability and maneuverability. The purpose of this paper is to study a new configuration of coaxial rotor as applied to a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) with t...

This article presents perception and navigation systems for a family of autonomous orchard vehicles. The systems are customized to enable safe and reliable driving in modern planting environments. The perception system is based on a global positioning system (GPS)-free sensor suite composed of a twodimensional (2-D) laser scanner, wheel and steerin...

This work developed and evaluated a human-machine interface for the control of a roadable air vehicle (RAV), capable of surface driving, vertical takeoff, sustained flight, and landing. Military applications seek to combine the benefits of ground and air vehicles to maximize flexibility of movement but require that the operator have minimal pilot t...

This paper describes the Tactical Autonomous Aerial LOgistics System (TALOS), developed and flight tested during the first phase of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS) Innovative Naval Prototype (INP) program. The ONR vision for AACUS is to create a retrofit perception/planning/human interface system th...

Autonomous orchard vehicles have been shown to increase worker efficiency in tasks including pruning, thinning, tree maintenance, and pheromone placing. To cover entire blocks, they must be able to repeatedly exit an orchard row, turn, and enter the next. The authors' experience deploying autonomous vehicles for five years in commercial and researc...

Rows of trees such as in orchards, planted in straight parallel lines can provide navigation cues for autonomous machines that operate in between them. When the tree canopies are well managed, tree rows appear similar to corridor walls and a simple 2D sensing scheme suffices. However, when the tree canopies are three dimensional, or ground vegetati...

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee (TC) on Agricultural Robotics and Automation was launched in 2012 with the goal of bringing together researchers and practitioners, academic and industrial, in an informal setting to increase knowledge dissemination in the field. The goal for 2013 is to hold at least eight Webinars and fo...

Mobile robots and vehicles with active articulated elements are well suited to drive on irregular and rough terrain because they are able to adjust their center of mass and decrease the risk of tip over or other accidents. The articulated mechanism, however, is usually constrained by the actuator's bandwidth, making it difficult for the vehicle to...

This paper addresses the refactoring of an agricultural vehicle localization system and its deployment and field-testing in apple orchards. The system enables affordable precision agriculture in tree fruit production by providing the vehicle's position in the orchard without the use of expensive differential GPS. The localization methodology depend...

We present a monocular visual navigation methodology for autonomous orchard vehicles. Modern orchards are usually planted with straight and parallel tree rows that form a corridor-like environment. Our task consists of driving a vehicle autonomously along the tree rows. The original contributions of this paper are: 1) a method to recover vehicle ro...

Safe robot navigation in tree fruit orchards requires that the vehicle be capable of robustly navigating between rows of trees and turning from one aisle to another; that the vehicle be dynamically stable, especially when carrying workers; and that the vehicle be able to detect obstacles on its way and adjust its speed accordingly. In this paper we...

Crop yield estimation is an important task in apple orchard management. The current manual sampling-based yield estimation is time-consuming, labor-intensive and inaccurate. To deal with this challenge, we develop and deploy a computer vision system for automated, rapid and accurate yield estimation. The system uses a two-camera stereo rig for imag...

Specialty crops constitute a $45 billion/year industry. As opposed to crops such as wheat, cotton, corn and soybean, they are characterized by the need for intensive cultivation. Specialty crops growers currently face serious labor cost and availability problems, and few technological solutions exist to increase their efficiency given the past hist...

Sixty years after debuting in industrial environments, robots are making their way into our everyday life. Farmers have benefited for some time from self-guided machinery including combines and harvesters. More recently, multi-purpose autonomous vehicles have started to be deployed in orchards, groves, nurseries, and other agricultural environments...

Crop yield estimation is an essential element in apple orchard management. Apple growers currently predict yield based on historical records and manual counting. These methods require extensive experience on the part of farm managers to take into account variations in weather, soil conditions, pests, etc., and are generally labor-intensive and inac...

Urucu, deep in the Amazon forest, is the largest in-land natural gas and oil producing site in Brazil. The oil and gas extracted in Urucu travel some 700 km in a pipeline through the jungle until they reach Manaus, where they are refined and consumed. Exploration of the site is condi-tioned on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras monitoring a 400 km...

In this chapter we deal with the problem of fault tolerant control of robotic manipulators. We present a fault-modeling framework based on Markovian jump linear systems. An important feature of this approach is that it does not require that the manipulator be stopped when a fault is detected, i.e., the manipulator can continue moving until all join...

This chapter describes the main features of the underactuted manipulators we use to validate the control approaches proposed throughout the book. It describes also a control environment for robots which we use to simulate the controllers and to operate the manipulators.

This chapter deals with linear robust control of robot manipulators. The approach we consider is based on the combination of two controllers, computed torque and linear \({\mathcal{H}}_\infty.\) Experimental results using the UARM manipulator and CERob environment are presented to illustrate the validity of the method.

In this chapter we present three nonlinear \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) control techniques for underactuated cooperative manipulators. Two are based on a quasi-linear parameter varying (quasi-LPV) representation of the nonlinear system with solutions based on game theory. These controllers take into account a fundamental characteristic of cooperative...

In this chapter we present the application of the \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) and adaptive \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) control methodologies to underactuated robotic manipulators, or manipulators with more joints than actuators. We begin by presenting a taxonomy to classify the different types of underactuation. Next, we present both model-based and...

In this chapter, we present adaptive nonlinear \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) controllers for robot manipulators. Similarly to the controllers presented in Chap. 3, the ones here guarantee robustness to parametric uncertainty and external disturbances. They go beyond, however, by allowing us to estimate the parametric uncertainties and the unmodeled dy...

This chapter deals with nonlinear \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) control methodologies for robot manipulators. The nonlinear \({\mathcal{H}}_{\infty}\) control considered guarantees an appropriate attenuation of the torque disturbance effect on the joint positions. We deal with two fundamental approaches for this class of controllers; the first is base...

In this chapter we present control strategies for cooperative manipulators with passive joints. These systems differ from the ones presented earlier because, here, one must control not only the position of the common load being manipulated by the various robots, but also the internal forces in the object to ensure it will not be damaged during the...

Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops (CASC) is a four-year project to develop crop intelligence and agricultural automation technologies for the apple and nursery tree industries. Supported by the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative, CASC aims at impacting industry where it matters most: increasing production efficiency and reducing lab...

Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops is a project focused on the needs of the specialty crops sector, with a focus on apples and nursery trees. The project’s main thrusts are the integration of robotics technology and plant science; understanding and overcoming socio-economic barriers to technology adoption; and making the results available...

In fruit and shade tree nurseries, there is a need to count and measure caliper for trees frequently so as to have an accurate inventory sufficiently before harvest since disease, pests and climate can change the yield from year to year. In some tree nurseries it is common practice to count the entire stock three times a year and to caliper them on...

In modern orchards, many maintenance tasks call for a driver to steer a tractor through rows of trees at slow speeds over hundreds of acres as it mows or sprays. Similarly, manually-driven orchard platforms allow a crew of workers to perform tasks such as pruning, training, and thinning. In this paper we report on the development of vehicles capabl...

Specialty crops are defined as fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits and nursery crops including floriculture. In 2008 the US Department of Agriculture launched the Specialty Crop Research Initiative to promote innovative research and development in five legislatively-mandated areas: plant breeding and genetics; threats from pests and dise...

Marcel Bergerman focuses on a number of key factors that need to be considered for improving leadership qualities. He suggests that a person needs to have vision or foresight to define the goals that need to be pursued to perform a task efficiently. Vision is defined as a skill that allows a person to combine prior knowledge with new information to...

We present a cascaded control architecture for a Yamaha RMAX robotic helicopter. The controller is composed of an inner-loop that stabilizes the unstable poles of the helicopter's linear dynamic model; and an outer-loop that decouples the dynamics of the lateral, longitudinal, vertical, and heading axes and enables trajectory tracking. Actual fligh...

Lunar and planetary surfaces are the most hostile working environments into which humans can be sent. The protective spacesuit is massive and cumbersome, with EVA mission time limited by both the suit's resources and the astronaut's stamina. To maintain human presence on the Moon and to expand it to Mars requires enormous investments in transportat...

The problem of fault tolerance in cooperative manipulators rigidly connected to an undeformable load is addressed in this paper. Four categories of faults are considered: free-swinging joint faults (FSJFs), locked joint faults (LJFs), incorrectly measured joint position faults (JPFs), and incorrectly measured joint velocity faults (JVFs). Free-swin...

In January 2004, NASA began a bold enterprise to return to the Moon, and with the technologies and expertise gained, press on to Mars. The underlying Vision for Space Exploration calls for a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond; to conduct human expeditions to Mars after successfully demonstratin...

Current NASA plans envision human beings returning to the Moon in 2018 and, once there, establishing a permanent outpost from which we may initiate a long-term effort to visit other planetary bodies in the Solar System. This will be a bold, risky, and costly journey, comparable to the Great Navigations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ther...

A successful plan for space exploration requires the commissioning of fleets of robots to prospect, mine, build, inspect and maintain structures, and generally assist astronauts, rendering the overall mission as safe as reasonably achievable for human beings, the most precious resource. The authors are currently developing, under the support of NAS...

Digital video compression is a computationally intensive task, in which motion estimation accounts for a significant portion of the arithmetic operations. This paper presents ME64, a dedicated scalable hardware architecture for fast computation of motion vectors. ME64 is a highly parallel architecture, based on a matrix of 64 processing elements at...

In this article we focus on post-failure control of a mechanical manipulator from the point of view of optimal control, and present a novel method for controlling the positions of the failed, passive joints in an optimal way. It used the so-called coupling index as an optimization criterion to minimize the energy spent by the underactuated manipula...

Digital video compression is a computationally intensive task, in which motion estimation accounts for a significant portion of the arithmetic operations. This paper presents ME64, a dedicated scalable hardware architecture for fast computation of motion vectors. ME64 is a highly parallel architecture, based on a matrix of 64 processing elements at...

This paper presents the Remotely Accessible Laboratory (REAL), a virtual laboratory accessible through the Internet. REAL allows a remote user to manipulate a mobile robot in a mode of interaction suitable to his or her level of expertise. A basic mode of interaction, dedicated to users with limited knowledge of robotics, supports interaction via t...

Internet robotic systems have a different role in the use and development of aerial robots compared to that for ground robots. While for ground robotic vehicles, Internet is useful for remote operation or to make remote development, in aerial vehicles, in addition, the safety aspect must be considered very carefully. This paper addresses the requir...

Robotic unmanned aerial vehicles have great potential as surveying and instrument deployment platforms in the exploration of planets and moons with an atmosphere. Among the various types of planetary aerovehicles proposed, lighter-than-atmosphere (LTA) systems are of particular interest because of their extended mission duration and long traverse c...

This paper presents REAL (Remotely Accessible Laboratory), a virtual laboratory accessible through the Internet. The objective of REAL is to provide remote access to a mobile robots infrastructure. REAL has been implemented as a new generation telecommunication service, not as a commonplace World Wide Web (WWW) application. As such, it employs a so...

The problem of fault tolerance in cooperative manipulators rigidly connected to a solid object is addressed in this paper. Four faults are considered: free-swinging joint faults, locked joint faults, incorrect measured joint position, and incorrect measured joint velocity. The faults are first detected by a, fault detection and isolation system. Fr...

Robotic unmanned aerial vehicles have an enormous potential as observation and data-gathering platforms for a wide variety of applications. These applications include environmental and biodiversity research and monitoring, urban planning and traffic control, inspection of man-made structures, mineral and archaeological prospecting, surveillance and...

iv The class of underactuated systems is composed of a variety of mechanical as well as biological systems. The term underactuation refers to the fact that not all joints or degreesof -freedom (DOFs) of the system are equipped with actuators, or are directly controllable. The DOFs of an underactuated system are dynamically coupled, and their dynami...

Robotic unmanned aerial vehicles have an enormous potential as observation and data-gathering platforms for a wide variety of applications. This paper discusses components of a perception architecture being developed for AURORA (Autonomous Unmanned Remote Monitoring Robotic Airship). The AURORA project focuses on the development of the technologies...

Project AURORA aims at the development of an unmanned airship capable of autonomous flight over user-defined locations for aerial inspection and imagery acquisition. Presents a guidance control strategy for the trajectory path following of the AURORA airship, where the objective is to make the vehicle follow a set of pre-defined points. The guidanc...

This paper presents REAL (Remotely Accessible Laboratory), a virtual laboratory accessible through the Internet. The objective of REAL is to provide access, to any researcher, to the ITFs mobile robots infrastructure. REAL has been implemented as a new generation telecommunication service, not as an commonplace World Wide Web application. As such,...

With the crescent utilization of robot manipulators in hard-to-access or inhospitable sites, the development of reliable fault tolerant control methods for these machines becomes vital. This course presents the work developed by the authors in the last three years on fault tolerant control methods for robot manipulators. The theory presented is val...

The increased utilization of manipulators in hazardous or hard-to-reach environments have led to a corresponding increase on the study of fault tolerant control methods for these mechanisms, ranging from robot design and trajectory planning to fault detection and isolation and post-failure control algorithms. In this article we focus on post-failur...

Project AURORA aims at the development of an unmanned airship capable of autonomous flight over user-defined locations for aerial inspection and imagery acquisition. In this article the authors report a successful autonomous flight achieved through a set of pre-defined points, one of the first of its kind in the literature. The guidance control str...

When two or more robotic manipulators are working cooperatively, faults can put at risk the task, the robots, or the manipulated load. In this work, two artificial neural networks are employed in a fault detection and isolation system for cooperative robotic manipulators. A multilayer perceptron is utilized to reproduce the dynamics of the cooperat...

This paper presents a novel fault detection and isolation method for mechanical manipulators based on Luenberger observers. The method is able to cope with free-swinging joint failures, which render the joint actuator inoperative and with zero torque. A variable threshold is defined to improve the fault detection and isolation anytime during the jo...

In this article we present a hybrid systems approach for fault tolerant control of robot manipulators. Our method is based on a combination of fault detection and isolation, control reconfiguration, and control algorithms. The contribution of this work is the construction of a hybrid automaton for control reconfiguration, whose discrete states indi...

In this article we address the important problem of robust control design for an underactuated manipulator robot with three joints. The H-infinity design procedure considers the generalized regulator problem, and a suboptimal H-infinity controller is designed. This control strategy is compared with a known PID control for different structures of th...

This paper presents a fault tolerance system for robotic manipulators with free-swinging joint failures. First, a fault detection and isolation system based on artificial neural networks is applied. When the fault is detected and isolated, the control actions are reconfigurated to work with the underactuated manipulator. The faulty joint (without a...

Evolutionary computation is a generic name given to the resolution of computational problems that are planned and implemented based on models of the evolutionary process. Most of the evolutionary algorithms that have been proposed follow biological paradigms and the concepts of natural selection, mutation and reproduction. There are, however, other...

Robotic unmanned aerial vehicles have an enormous potential as observation and data-gathering platforms for a wide variety of applications. These applications include environmental and biodiversity research and monitoring, urban planning and traffic control, inspection of man-made structures, mineral and archaeological prospecting, surveillance and...

In the last ten years there has been a significant advance in the challenging problem of position control of under-actuated manipulators. In this article we review the current state-of-the-art in this area and point out the research problems ought to be solved in the next decade.

In this article we present a comparison study of the robustness properties of three model-based nonlinear controllers for cooperative underactuated manipulators. Two of the controllers are based on feedback linearization of the nonlinear dynamic coupling between the torques applied at the actuated joints and the Cartesian acceleration of the load....

We propose in this work the first model-based robust control method for a team of underactuated manipulators jointly manipulating a load. The method is based on feedback linearization of the nonlinear dynamic coupling between the torques applied at the actuated joints and the Cartesian acceleration of the load, combined with a variable structure co...

Underactuated manipulators are robot manipulators composed of both active and passive joints in serial chain mechanisms. The study of underactuation is significant for the control of a variety of rigid-body systems, such as free-floating robots in space and gymnasts, whose structure include passive joints. For mechanisms with large degrees of freed...

In Project AURORA - &tonomous JJnmaned Remote Monitoring Robotic Airship - we focus on the development of a semi-autonomous unmanned robotic airship for aerial inspection purposes. This work deals with the design of a robust pitch attitude controller to be used in the real airship at different operating velocity and heaviness conditions. A PID cont...

This paper studies the problem of modeling and control of multiple cooperative underactuated manipulators handling a rigid object. We reveal holonomic property of such a system by presenting a smooth feedback controller subject to two conditions: 1) there are not fewer active joints than the degrees of freedom of the object; and 2) the Jacobian mat...

Large scale outdoor robotic systems call for a supporting software environment during the phases of their development and operation. In this article we describe the support infrastructure designed for Project AURORA's robotic airship. This includes tools for pilot training, for design and test of control and navigation methods, for airship visualiz...