The all-terrain robot Mana from LAAS to ELROB

18 octobre 2012

Around 10 academic and industrial teams in Europe participate in these meetings designed to test the limits of capabilities of robots with a huge requirement.

LAAS participated to the ELROB event (European Land Robot Trial), held in Thun (Switzerland), Sept. 24-28. In this event all-terrain robots are tested realistic conditions in various scenarios: navigation, replay of previously learned trajectories, exploration of a given area. The laboratory has evaluated and demonstrated the autonomous navigation capabilities of the robot Mana, in particularly difficult conditions: woodlands, rough and slippery terrains...

The participation in this event helped to identify some issues (detecting water holes, locomotion control on slippery terrains). Developments carried out in the laboratory have also been validated, such as precise 100 Hz localization by fusing vision and inertial sensors, or a distributed architecture for the supervision of all the on board processes.