If your UAV has wheels and you're landing on tarmac, how to stop at exactly the right spot to win the T3-6 competition? Powerslide!
From BotJunkie:
"At ICRA last week, Stanford presented some footage of the latest trick they’ve been able to teach their robotic Volkswagen Passat. Driving backwards at 25 mph, Junior autonomously hits the brakes and starts to skid, at the same time rotating 180 degrees to (most of the time) end up neatly in a parking space. The video shows a couple different techniques: “closed-loop control” means that Junior is performing on the fly adjustments to its trajectory based on sensor data, while “open-loop control” means that Junior is simply executing a set of commands that result in a powerslide motion. Ideally, the entire maneuver would be closed loop, but the dynamics of a powerslide are too complex to model accurately. So instead, Junior uses closed-loop control during the lead-in backwards acceleration phase, and then transitions into open-loop control as the slide starts.
Now, part of the reason that Volkswagen/Audi are helping to fund all of this stuff is that eventually, they hope to use the technology in production automobiles to help keep us all safe. And, if you think about it, there are those occasional times where you see a parking spot open up behind you on the opposite side of the street with someone else about to snag it. By implementing this parking technology in consumer cars, you’ll be able to park that much faster, thus decreasing the amount of time that you’re on the road and therefore lowering your accident risk. Autonomous powerslide parking: it keeps you safe!"
Comments
Now we will have techno war. Say what happens when,
1. two cars equipped with same technology see the same parking spot and zoooms in , what happens now?
2. One car with no such technology is on the right side of the road and approaching the spot , while other car with this technology also targets the same space!! ? Say the car with this tech homes in a tad faster and takes the parking, now is that morally right while other car was slow but on the right side of the road!!?
Just a thought.
Both Big dollar but amazing sensors
Next on the list of items to automate, reverse powersliding to get out of the impossibly small parking spaces :P