September 2023
Perception and Navigation for Heavy-Duty Machines
Towards robust perception and navigation solutions for heavy-duty machines operating in all-weather conditions
Heavy-duty machines operate in highly complex, unstructured, and cluttered environments like forests, construction, and mines. Several challenges arise when working in these complex environments due to environmental conditions like low visibility during adverse weather for outdoor sites and low illumination areas like mines. These working conditions put a cognitive burden on the operators and make the operation prone to accidents for the operators and the humans working near the machines. This leads to the increasing demand for semi-autonomous or autonomous systems either to reduce the burden on operators or to have completely autonomous systems. These autonomous solutions could include object detection, mapping, and navigation in the environment in challenging conditions requiring perception sensors like cameras, lidars, and radars. In this newsletter, we take a closer look into the usage of perception for detection and navigation for heavy-duty mobile machines (HDMMs). The first article describes how lidar sensors can be used effectively in a forest environment, while the second article explains how radar sensors could be effective for navigation in any scenario.
Articles
- LiDAR-based perception in a forest environment
Robust tree detection and navigation in an unstructured forest environment - Radar Perception for Heavy-Duty Mobile Machines
Ego-motion estimation using high-resolution radar data
