Line-of-sight tracking based upon modern heuristics approach

Any autonomous vehicle must be able to successfully navigate a wide variety of situations and terrain conditions. As a result, proposed solutions usually involve a sophisticated and expensive implementation of both hardware and software. In many situations, however, truly autonomous operation may not be necessary or practical. Instead, equipping and training a vehicle to automatically follow a human-controlled lead vehicle is a viable alternative. While still autonomous, the vehicle relies upon its leader to handle the complex decisions with regards to course and speed. This paper presents a simple and elegant configuration, called FLoST for Fuzzy Line of Sight Tracking, based on inexpensive line-of-sight devices controlled by a heuristic to determine direction and speed of a follower. Unlike the alternative approach where the follower needs to undergo a complex training process, the follower using the approach presented in this paper primarily relies upon a human leader to provide direction, allowing for a much simpler and less expensive vehicle implementation while still being able to match or exceed the effectiveness of the autonomous design under similar conditions. Finally, three boundary cases of lead vehicle maneuvers (circle, spiral and weave) are presented to show the efficacy of this approach.