Autonomous Navigation for Binary Asteroid Landing: A vision-based and altimeter-aided navigation filter for small spacecraft

This paper investigates the performance of an autonomous navigation system to navigate a spacecraft in the proximity of a binary asteroid system using optical and laser ranging measurements. The knowledge about the binary asteroid is limited to its orbital parameters and ellipsoid shape models. The accelerometer bias random walk is included in...

Naval engineering and ship control special edition editorial

Editorial Special Issue: Naval Engineering and Ship Control II

Detect and Avoid for Autonomous Agents in Cluttered Environments

Autonomous agents are the future of many services and industries such as delivery systems, surveillance and monitoring, and search and rescue missions. An important aspect in an autonomous agent is the navigation system it uses to traverse the environment. Not much emphasis has been paid in the past on autonomous agent navigation in cluttered...

Sensor Fusion in Autonomous Navigation for Asteroid Observation Missions

Spacecraft navigation and control is difficult in deep space operations. Especially around asteroids, the irregular gravity field increases the difficulty of estimating the spacecraft trajectory. Autonomous navigation can increase the safety and accuracy for orbit proximity operations. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for continuous...

Autonomous Navigation around Asteroids using Convolutional Neural Networks

Missions to small bodies are increasingly gaining interest as they might hold the secrets to our solar system’s origin while some are also posing a threat to life on Earth. The small size and irregular shape result in complex dynamics complicating the close-proximity operations. Furthermore, due to the long round-trip time communication delays...

Quantification of the risk reduction potential of autonomous navigation

Autonomous ships have become a topic of interest for an increasing number of researchers over the last few years. Most of the research that is being performed focuses on autonomous navigation. An important driver for this research is the belief that autonomous navigation will increase safety at sea. In order to evaluate the possible safety...

Waterborne platooning: A viability study of the vessel train concept

The research in this thesis is a viability study of a waterborne platooning concept called the Vessel Train (VT). This manuscript describes the VT characteristics. It explains how the VT’s advantages are reaped, as well as the VT’s challenges that need to be considered and dealt with. To assess the potential of the platooning concept an inland...

The effect of autonomous systems on the crew size of ships–a case study

Recently, autonomous ships have gotten a lot more attention both in the media and in research. However, very little research has focussed on the effects of automation on the size of the crew. This paper analyses the effects of added automation on the required size and composition of the crew on a 750 TEU short sea container vessel. A Crew...

Indoor swarm exploration with Pocket Drones

Pocket drones, weighing less than 50 grams, are small, agile and inherently safe. This makes them suitable for several surveillance tasks such as search and rescue, green-house monitoring and pipe-line inspection. In order for a more efficient search, a swarm of pocket drones would be ideal to explore these types of areas faster. Current methods...

Real-time Vision-based Autonomous Navigation of MAV in Dynamic Environments

Safe navigation in unknown environments is a challenging task for autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) systems. Previous works generally avoid obstacles by assuming that the environment is static. The purpose of this thesis work is to develop a MAV system that can navigate autonomously and safely in dynamic environments. We present an onboard...

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Goal-directed Visual Navigation

Safe navigation in a cluttered environment is a key capability for the autonomous operation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). This work explores a (deep) Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach for monocular vision based obstacle avoidance and goal directed navigation for MAVs in cluttered environments. We investigated this problem in the...

A General Purpose Control Design For Vision Based Autonomous Quadrotor Navigation

Quadrotors  are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are controlled by changing the angular speed of the four rotors. In the recent years, they have received a large  attention from the research community thanks to their  vertical take-off and landing capability, small dimension, payload, flight endurance and low price  which it has increased...

Human-Aware Autonomous Navigation of a Care Robot in Domestic Environments

A major societal challenge in occidental countries nowadays is the continuously increasing ageing population. Due to this ageing society, solutions are needed to alleviate the limited care personnel and the ever increasing healthcare costs. To this end, service robots are proposed to meet this demand by assisting the elderly with their daily...

Stability-based Scale Estimation of Monocular SLAM for Autonomous Quadrotor Navigation

We propose a novel method to deal with the scale ambiguity in monocular SLAM based on control stability. We analytically show that (1) using unscaled state feedback from monocular SLAM for control can lead to system instability, and (2) there is a unique linear relationship between the absolute scale of the SLAM system and the control gain at...

Towards an Experimental Platform for Inland Waterway Ship Navigation