National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Introduction

Interactive Robotics Laboratory

Location: ERB-220 (Lab) and ESB-531 (Office); Web: http://www2.statler.wvu.edu/~irl/

- Learning by Doing

Bio-Inspired Robotics

Robot Design and Testing Sensor Fusion

Human-Robot Interaction Remote Sensing

• Over a decade of practical experience;

• Specialize in air and ground robot

design and instrumentation;

• Operates both indoor and outdoor

flight testing facilities.

The Interactive Robotics Laboratory (IRL) is a

multi-disciplinary research group at West Virginia

University (WVU). At IRL, we are interested in

exploring and understanding the interactions

between:

• a robot’s mind and its body;

• a robot and its surrounding environment;

• heterogeneous robots;

• robots and humans;

• 3D wind estimation and gust

suppression in aircraft close

formation flight;

• Wide-field optical flow aided

inertial navigation;

• Adaptive and fault tolerant flight

control.

• Control theoretic modeling of human pilots;

• Handling quality evaluation of robotic systems;

• Investigate adverse pilot-vehicle coupling

conditions;

• Predict unstable and unsafe human-machine

interactions.

• Combine information from diverse sources;

• Reliable navigation in both GPS available and

GPS denied environments;

• Automated and online sensor calibration;

• Intelligent and fault tolerant sensor fusion;

• Analytical validation of nonlinear stochastic filter

stability;

• Tightly coupled

robot perception

and action.

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Scatter Plot for the Geo-Referencing Error

North-South [m]

East-

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[m]

1m

5m

10m

25m

Individual Estimate w/o Attitude Correction

Mean Position w/o Attitude Correction

Individual Estimate w/ Attitude Correction

Mean Position w/ Attitude Correction

• High resolution and on-demand aerial image and

sensor data collection;

• Accurate real-time geo-referencing;

• Air sample collection;

• Multiple aircraft cooperative sensing.

R/C Receiver

GPS Antenna

Data Logger (GPS/INS)

Laser Range Finder

Video Camera

Video Transmitter

Digital Still Camera