High reliability navigation for autonomous vehicles

RAHCO International, in partnership with the Department of Energy, has developed a 40 ton, prototypical, track mounted, unmanned ground vehicle for hazardous environmental remediation. This unmanned vehicle is capable of navigating preprogrammed courses accurately within twelve inches at a speed of 3 feet per second to transport transuranic waste. This paper will describe the vehicle's navigation system that consists of a differential Global Positioning and Dead Reckoning system that utilizes a rate gyro, electronic compass, and track velocity sensors. It will also describe the results of a technology demonstration conducted in August 1995 at Idaho National Engineering Laboratories (INEL). RAHCO will also describe future applications including nuclear facilities, ordnance disposal sites, and ordnance test sites, and discuss system enhancements such as latency reduction, on board autonomy, mission planning, vehicle control command generation, and man/machine interface systems. In the future, the vehicle will be able to accurately operate at a higher speed. To achieve this, control and Global Positioning System (GPS) latencies and telemetry lagtimes will be reduced and implemented in a highly reliable architecture. We will transport the system to pre-emptive multi tasking and multi processing in an applications protected environment utilizing parallel processing architecture for real time control.