This project addresses the issues related with the use of autonomous systems for transportation in structured environments such as urban areas or industrial facilities. Control and navigation problems are addressed along with energy management, generation and fleet mission control. Human interaction is also under consideration since the vehicles operate in multiple modes varying from teleoperation to full autonomous.

Motivation

The automobile has provided unprecedented mobility, allowing access to resources inside and outside of the city environment. Although automobiles have and will continue to improve in performance, they are still responsible for many negative side effects, some of which are:

Safety

Injuries and deaths of pedestrians and vehicle occupants

Energy

The petroleum based fuels present many advantages although the disadvantaged are more serious for the environment, like air pollution. With other solution like vehicles propelled by electric motors we will be capable of having low emissions, cost substantially less to operate, and lessen our dependence on petroleum.

Traffic

In the last years, we assist an increases in ownership and usage of private cars in the world and the dependence on road for a proportion of freight movement have led to increasingly high levels of congestion. The public transports are very inefficient in support of mobility that the society impose to the an active worker that as a family where is necessary to transport the children's to school and go to work respecting the hours. New systems and technologies need to development to introduce a better mobility quality to the society become more productive and with better quality of live. Vehicles continue to grow in weight and volume, while they consume more resources (energy and space). This mentality is inefficient and has taken a toll on the urban infrastructure - daily traffic jams. Parking is limited and therefore expensive. Idle vehicles occupy a significant percent of precious real estate while parked. Even more problematic, cars contribute to hostile social interactions, as drivers fend for themselves for the limited resources of space, energy, and time. The price paid for mobility is unacceptable in an urban environment, where positive social interaction should be encouraged, not clouded by aggressive gluttony. This battle for time and space has been approached by simply adding more resources-increasing the number of parking structures and constructing more lane highways. However, these solutions simply mask the problems.