Beginning in the fall of 2003, a new research and development project was initiated at MDA in the area of autonomous vehicles (AV's). Current parallel industry developments at the time of the program start date were the landing of JPL's twin Mars Exploration Rovers and the DARPA Grand Challenge to race AV's across a California desert.

The high-level objectives of MDA's AV initiative are to develop key technologies for the application of AV's to space, mining, and military, and to demonstrate these technologies on a hardware test bed. The focus to date has been on the guidance, navigation, and control of autonomous vehicles, rather than on vehicle design and mobility issues.

The project draws heavily on work from several existing thrusts including the extensive development that has been carried out in the vision lab at MDA on real-time stereo vision systems.

One of the lower level objectives of the current project is to take an existing motion estimation technique and tailor it for use on a mobile vehicle. This involves fusing other sources of information (e.g., odometry, inertial measurements, GPS) with stereo vision to estimate where a vehicle is throughout its movement. A terrain mapping and motion planning technique is under development, also based on stereo-vision.

Another prior art development is the Laser Guidance System (LGS) developed at Automated Mining Systems (AMS), which uses a planar laser rangefinder to navigate load-haul-dump (LHD) vehicles in underground mine drifts. It should be possible to port the IGS capability to the new AV test bed at MDA, which is equipped with the same type of laser rangefinder used on the LHD's.

The new AV test bed is an off-the-shelf ATRV-Jr mobile robot. It has numerous sensors including: a custom stereo camera atop a tall pan-tilt mast, a SICK laser rangefinder, sonar rangefinders, an inertial measurement unit, tactile bumper sensors, odometry, a differential global positioning system, a compass, and an inclinometer. There are two computers on board which link to the lab's systems through wireless Ethernet. The robot is roughly 1 m long and tall and has a mass of around 100 kg.

The current AV project plan has realized the completion of the above-mentioned motion estimation, terrain mapping, and motion planning techniques at the end of the summer 2004. Field trials have been successfully been carried out this fall, at nearby parks and quarries. The present project target is to have the ATRV-Jr travel autonomously through a cluttered outdoor environment for a few hundred meters, while capturing a photorealistic 3D rendering of the environment.

This project has been designed to tackle some of the fundamental generic issues associated with mobile robotics, to position MDA into some of the emerging markets such as planetary navigation, autonomous military vehicles and autonomous mining vehicles.