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An analysis is made or the basic principles which govern the operation of those air‐cushion devices otherwise known as ground‐effect machines (GEMs). Most of these vehicles can be defined as machines which operate in close proximity to the earth's surface without ever physically touching it because they are always separated from it by a cushion or a layer of air, however thin; as a consequence, propulsion and control of GEMs must be of an aerodynamic nature. The only machines not covered by this definition are special types of over‐water GEMs. It is proposed to establish six main categories of GEMs from which all other possible configurations could be evolved by proper combination of the basic types. For each of these six configurations, a critical biographical survey is made and some comparative features are pointed out. The overall picture is one of great complexity because of the large number of parameters involved. This points out the danger of a ‘hardware’ approach to the GEM problem until a firm base of comprehensive research has been established. At the present time, the emphasis placed on the annular jet seems justified, inasmuch as the annular jet represents a good compromise between versatility, simplicity and performance.

TWENTY years ago the phenomenon of ground‐effect was known and to some extent understood but at the same time regarded generally with some misgivings. An aircraft in close proximity to the ground was often found to have lift capabilities far in excess of those evident at higher altitudes and this was attributed to the air ‘trapped’ between the aircraft and the ground. To the student pilot attempting a three‐point landing at a predetermined spot on the runway the tendency for the aeroplane with flap down to float on interminably was all too easily attributed to ground‐effect. This feature, embodied in the ram wing, was one portent of a number of air‐riding vehicles that certain far‐sighted men recognized as having tremendous potential. More recently it has become increasingly apparent that the ground‐effect phenomenon has a definite application to transportation and many countries are actively pursuing research and development investigations regarding the choice of the most suitable system.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the AUVSI Conference and Show held in Orlando, FL with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air and in the water.

The paper is based on in‐depth interviews with exhibitors of unmanned vehicles and the providers of the technologies which are fundamental to their design and deployment, as well as attendance at conference presentations.

The unmanned vehicle industry is largely driven by government requirements, both military and civilian. Unmanned service robots are also found in applications such as crop monitoring and fish school location at sea.

Robot builders need to continue to develop specialized robots and tooling to match with advancements in applications in the plastic industry. Users will need to think of robots as a necessary adjunct to any injection molding application.

The paper offers insights into the unmanned vehicle industry.

To demonstrate proof‐of‐concept of the Griffon man‐portable hybrid unmanned ground vehicle/unmanned aerial vehicle (UGV/UAV) based on the iRobot PackBot we developed the Griffon air mobility system consisting of a gasoline‐powered propeller engine, a steerable parafoil, and a radio‐controlled servo system. We integrated the AMS with a PackBot prototype, and we conducted ground and flight tests to validate this concept. The Griffon prototype was capable of remote‐controlled flight, take‐off, and landing. The Griffon achieved speeds of over 20 mph and altitudes of up to 200 feet. We demonstrated the feasibility of developing a man‐portable hybrid UGV/UAV. Future work may explore the possibilities for teleoperated, semi‐autonomous, and fully autonomous control using the Griffon concept. The parafoil wing limits the usability of this vehicle in windy conditions, but this could be addressed using a lightweight fixed wing instead. Man‐portable hybrid UGV/UAVs may be used by the military to perform reconnaissance and strike missions in urban environments, and by civilian teams to conduct search‐and‐rescue operations in hazardous terrain. This research provides the first demonstration of a man‐portable unmanned vehicle capable of both flight and ground locomotion, and it does so using a combat‐tested UGV platform.

The purpose of this paper is to review the 2008 AUVSI Conference and Show held in San Diego, California with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air and in the water.

The approach takes the form of in‐depth interviews with exhibitors of unmanned vehicles and the providers of the technologies which are fundamental to their design and deployment.

The unmanned robotic vehicle industry is largely driven by government requirements, both military and civilian. Unmanned service robots are also found in commercial applications such as pipeline surveillance, crop monitoring and fish school location at sea.

Developers will be challenged to meet the need for improvements in speed, payload, sensor capabilities, autonomous operation and command and control of fleets of unmanned vehicles.

The paper offers insights into trends and new products in the unmanned robotic vehicle industry.

This paper aims to design and control of a novel compact transportation system called the “wearable vehicle”. The wearable vehicle allows for traversing all types of terrains while transporting one's luggage in a comfortable and efficient manner.

The proposed design consists of a lower limb exoskeleton carrying two motorized wheels and two free wheels installed alongside its feet. This paper presents a detailed description of the system with its preliminary design and finite element analysis. Moreover, the system has been optimally designed to decrease wearable vehicle’s total weight, consequently leading to a reduction in motor size. Finally, two controllers have been designed to achieve stable operation of the wearable vehicle while walking. A PD controller with gravity compensation has been designed to ensure that the wearable vehicle tracks human motion, while a PID controller has been designed to ensure that the zero moment point is close to the center of the system’s support polygon.

Experimental tests were carried out to check the wearable vehicle concept. The obtained results prove the feasibility of the proposed wearable vehicle from the design, dynamics and control viewpoints.

This proposed wearable vehicle’s purpose is for traveling faster with less effort than normal walking. When a human comes across a flat open ground, the wearable vehicle can be used as a vehicle. However, when a human enters crowded traffic, an unstructured area or other obstacles like stairs, the vehicle can be switched into walking mode.

The wearable vehicle has seven DOFs exoskeletons, two motorized wheels, two free wheels and a foldable seat. It is used as a vehicle via its motorized and free wheels to travel fast with minimal effort. In addition, the human can switch easily into walking mode, if there is unstructured terrain to be traversed. Furthermore, an illustration of system's mechanisms and main feature parameters are presented to become acquainted with the ultimate benefits of the new system.

This paper aims to review the AUVSI Conference and show held in Denver, Colorado with emphasis on unmanned vehicles or service robots, their application on the ground, in the air and in the water.

In‐depth interviews with exhibitors of unmanned vehicles and the providers of the technologies which are fundamental to their design and deployment. Also attendance at conference presentations.

The unmanned vehicle industry is largely driven by government requirements, both military and civilian. Unmanned service robots are also found in applications such as crop monitoring and fish school location at sea.

Unmanned vehicles continue to address air ground and marine application needs where human safety is important. The vehicles continue to become more and more autonomous, ever better to address a wider range of application requirements.

This paper aims to focus on the spatial docking task of unmanned vehicles under ground conditions. The docking task of military unmanned vehicle application scenarios has strict requirements. Therefore, how to design a docking robot mechanism to achieve accurate docking between vehicles has become a challenge.

In this paper, first, the docking mechanism system is described, and the inverse kinematics model of the docking robot based on Stewart is established. Second, the genetic algorithm-based optimization method for multiobjective parameters of parallel mechanisms including workspace volume and mechanism flexibility is proposed to solve the problem of multiparameter optimization of parallel mechanism and realize the docking of unmanned vehicle space flexibility. The optimization results verify that the structural parameters meet the design requirements. Besides, the static and dynamic finite element analysis are carried out to verify the structural strength and dynamic performance of the docking robot according to the stiffness, strength, dead load and dynamic performance of the docking robot. Finally, taking the docking robot as the experimental platform, experiments are carried out under different working conditions, and the experimental results verify that the docking robot can achieve accurate docking tasks.

Experiments on the docking robot that the proposed design and optimization method has a good effect on structural strength and control accuracy. The experimental results verify that the docking robot mechanism can achieve accurate docking tasks, which is expected to provide technical guidance and reference for unmanned vehicles docking technology.

This research can provide technical guidance and reference for spatial docking task of unmanned vehicles under the ground conditions. It can also provide ideas for space docking missions, such as space simulator docking.

Most of the existing ground filtering algorithms are based on the Cartesian coordinate system, which is not compatible with the working principle of mobile light detection and ranging and difficult to obtain good filtering accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to improve the accuracy of ground filtering by making full use of the order information between the point and the point in the spherical coordinate.

First, the cloth simulation (CS) algorithm is modified into a sorting algorithm for scattered point clouds to obtain the adjacent relationship of the point clouds and to generate a matrix containing the adjacent information of the point cloud. Then, according to the adjacent information of the points, a projection distance comparison and local slope analysis are simultaneously performed. These results are integrated to process the point cloud details further and the algorithm is finally used to filter a point cloud in a scene from the KITTI data set.

The results show that the accuracy of KITTI point cloud sorting is 96.3% and the kappa coefficient of the ground filtering result is 0.7978. Compared with other algorithms applied to the same scene, the proposed algorithm has higher processing accuracy.

Steps of the algorithm are parallel computing, which saves time owing to the small amount of computation. In addition, the generality of the algorithm is improved and it could be used for different data sets from urban streets. However, due to the lack of point clouds from the field environment with labeled ground points, the filtering result of this algorithm in the field environment needs further study.

In this study, the point cloud neighboring information was obtained by a modified CS algorithm. The ground filtering algorithm distinguish ground points and off-ground points according to the flatness, continuity and minimality of ground points in point cloud data. In addition, it has little effect on the algorithm results if thresholds were changed.

A two‐day conference in May 1998 on unmanned vehicles gave a remarkable picture of the range of uses ‐ and particularly for military purposes ‐ to which robot vehicles are being put. Reconnaissance aircraft were by far the most strongly represented, although there was a US Navy paper looking at the future of “uninhabited combat air vehicles” (keeping a man in the control loop). There were also presentations on underwater vehicles, target vehicles and sensors. This report summarizes two aerial and two underwater applications.