Coordinating vehicles, using mirror enhanced target recognition

The long term goal behind this study is to achieve coordinated navigation of two or more robot vehicles, capable of autonomous operations in contaminated and hostile environments. One primary goal is to design and implement two basic functionalities named "Follow Me" and "Run Ahead of Me", which implies coordinated vehicles, capable of autonomous object recognition and tracking, using a time of flight laser range scanner as main sensor. Unfortunately the circumstances, made it impossible to create an applicable target tracking, using the two vehicles available, but a lot was learnt about the limitations when using lasers to recognize och track targets. The project did however, result in some promising motion models, describing the relative position and orientation (pose), of two coordinated vehicles, and because of their generality, the models has proven to work in various contexts. Trails show that target tracking, utilizing a laser range scanner, is possible but the resolution proves to be insufficient. Thus prospect are good to improve the measurements by using mirrors to reflect more laser pulses at the target, and by that receive more stable readings of the objects orientation.Validerat; 20101217 (root