Friday, May 8, 2009

How does it feel to drive Quanser UGV?

Today I would like to introduce another state-of-the-art product in the field of robotics and teleoperation :

Quanser Haptically Enabled UGV

After a couple of years of hard work and research this is a second generation of Quanser unmanned ground vehicles. On this UGV, our engineers have enabled the remote operator to make use of on-board GPS, camera, and soon-to-be installed robotic arms. Operated remotely or over a semi/fully autonomous mode, these robotic arms can fulfill remote tasks where the haptic force feedback will provide the user with precision and dexterity. The kinesthetic feeling of lateral and vertical motions of the vehicle can also be fed back to the user for an immersive driving. This is where Quanser ties human and machine together to seek out vast environments and manipulate remote objects as if they are in our own hands. In the existence of our user friendly and highly capable real time software, QuaRC, one can easily program the UGV for a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperative tasks to fully autonomous systems. This system is also capable of communicating with other Quanser UGVs and UAVs.

Among the general keywords and characteristics of this platform I can mainly name of communication and control speed, optimal design for battery durability, and robustness of the system in terms of control, safety and communication. Several layers of safety measures are defined and implemented by our experienced engineers while simplicity has been considered as an important factor.



After passing some major tests, the system is to undergo a series of experimental drives in advance of some major events and demos in close future.


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