Stingray: high-speed control of small UGVs in urban terrain

For the TARDEC-funded Stingray Project, iRobot Corporation and Chatten Associates are developing technologies that will allow small UGVs to operate at tactically useful speeds. In previous work, we integrated a Chatten Head-Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV) with an iRobot Warrior UGV, and used the HARV to drive the Warrior, as well as a small, high-speed, gas-powered UGV surrogate. In this paper, we describe our continuing work implementing semiautonomous driver-assist behaviors to help an operator control a small UGV at high speeds. We have implemented an IMU-based heading control behavior that enables tracked vehicles to maintain accurate heading control even over rough terrain. We are also developing a low-latency, low-bandwidth, high-quality digital video protocol to support immersive visual telepresence. Our experiments show that a video compression codec using the H.264 algorithm can produce several times better resolution than a Motion JPEG video stream, while utilizing the same limited bandwidth, and the same low latency. With further enhancements, our H.264 codec will provide an order of magnitude greater quality, while retaining a low latency comparable to Motion JPEG, and operating within the same bandwidth.