Abstract
Unmanned ground vehicles may be operated by remote control unit through the wireless communication or autonomously. However, the autonomous technology is still challenging and not perfectly developed. For some reason or other, the wireless communication is not always available. If wireless communication is abruptly disconnected, the UGV will be nothing but a lump of junk. What was worse, the UGV can be captured by enemy. This paper suggests a method, autonomous return technology with which the UGV can autonomously go back to a safer position along the reverse path. The suggested autonomous return technology for UGV is based on multi-correlated information based DB creation and matching. While SUGV moves by remote-control, the multi-correlated information based DB is created with the multi-sensor information; the absolute position of the trajectory is stored in DB if GPS is available and the hybrid MAP based on the fusion of VISION and LADAR is stored with the corresponding relative position if GPS is unavailable. In multi-correlated information based autonomous return, SUGV returns autonomously based on DB; SUGV returns along the trajectory based on GPS-based absolute position if GPS is available. Otherwise, the current position of SUGV is first estimated by the relative position using multi-sensor fusion followed by the matching between the query and DB. Then, the return path is created in MAP and SUGV returns automatically based on the MAP. Experimental results on the pre-built trajectory show the possibility of the successful autonomous return.
