The short course will provide an overview of AV (Autonomous Vehicle) technologies, in general, and underwater vehicles in particular. Attendees will explore robotics computing and software development through simulation and design of a controller (with mission planning) for an autonomous robot. The course is oriented toward practicing engineers and researchers interested in unmanned vehicles for both civilian and military applications. The course will be structured with lectures in the morning and practical hands-on learning experiences in the afternoon.

Course participants will:

• Gain a basic understanding of unmanned vehicle types, technologies, dynamics and control, instrumentation, hardware/software architectures, and software development.
• Explore advanced unmanned vehicle topics such as multi-vehicle cooperation, communication, energy, non-linear control and localization/mapping (SLAM).
• Learn basic robot control and then deploy underwater robots in the Georgia Tech acoustic testing tank to gain hands-on experience with the vehicles.

• Autonomous Vehicle Overview
  • Applications and Motivations
  • Technology
• Dynamics and Control of Autonomous Vehicles
  • Modeling
  • Low Level Control
• Instrumentation
  • Navigation
  • Payload
• Software
  • Architecture
  • Middleware (MOOS,ROS)
  • High Level/Behavior Based Control
• Advanced Topics
  • Multi Vehicle Cooperation
  • Communication
  • Energy
  • Nonlinear Control
  • Underwater SLAM
• Autonomous Vehicles Going Forward

Attendees will each receive copies of handouts and example code.

A basic understanding of programming in C and Matlab is assumed.

• Magnus Egerstedt
• Thomas Collins