IRL Visited by the Mountaineer Area Robotics (MARS) Team Last Night

Around 40 high school students and their teachers toured lab and saw the quadrotor flight demonstrations.

IRL hosted the first Open House!

Our open house today is very successful! We showed the close formation flight video, the teaching robots, among many other things. Of course the most interesting part is the quadrotor demonstration. It automatically followed a ground rover as it drives around.

Presenting Engineering Data Using MATLAB Figures

Research ideas can be effectively communicated using visual representations of data.  Computer software, such as MATLAB, provides many useful tools which can be used to aid in the preparation of illustrative figures.  Some general recommendations are provided in this article in order to generate quality figures for various technical works.  Additionally, more detailed examples are offered to provide examples of these techniques in practice. 

Read the Article Here

Understanding Nonlinear Kalman Filters, Part II: An Implementation Guide

Kalman filters provide an important technique for estimating the states of engineering systems.  With several variations of nonlinear Kalman filters, there is a lack of guidelines for filter selection with respect to a specific research or engineering application.  This creates a need for an in-depth discussion of the intricacies of different nonlinear Kalman filters.  Particularly of interest for practical state estimation applications are the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF).  This tutorial is divided into three self-contained articles. Part II presents detailed information about the implementation of EKF and UKF, including equations, tips, and example codes.    

Read the Article Here

Understanding Nonlinear Kalman Filters, Part I: Selection between EKF and UKF

Kalman filters provide an important technique for estimating the states of engineering systems.  With several variations of nonlinear Kalman filters, there is a lack of guidelines for filter selection with respect to a specific research or engineering application.  This creates a need for an in-depth discussion of the intricacies of different nonlinear Kalman filters.  Particularly of interest for practical state estimation applications are the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF).  This tutorial is divided into three self-contained articles.  Part I gives a general comparison of EKF and UKF, and offers a guide to the selection of a filter.  

Read the Article Here

Introducing the Interactive Robotics Letters

The Interactive Robotics Letters (IRL) is an open-review and open-access research forum that is organized by the West Virginia University (WVU) Interactive Robotics Laboratory (also IRL). The purpose of IRL is to help disseminate the latest research outcomes in robotics, explore radically different or controversial ideas, and promote research collaborations. Authors for IRL papers are not limited to WVU researchers. Submissions can be made by directly emailing the editorial board with a PDF document following this template.

The IRL is also serving as an experiment for a new form of interactive publication that lies between traditional peer-reviewed journals and collective contributed Wiki pages. Each submitted manuscript that passes an initial screening by the editorial board will be posted online. The article is then open to review by any researchers in the field, whose names will be acknowledged in the revised publication.  Following each review, the article will be revised by the original authors and then updated online with a new version number and a summary of the revisions. Additionally, each article will have a corresponding blog page for readers to post their suggestions and comments. Feedback from readers will be solicited in refining or correcting the article during its entire life cycle. A detailed documentation of the editorial history will be included in each revision and all earlier versions will be accessible from the IRL website.

Read more about IRL...

A New Grant to Develop a "Mobile Robotics" Course

Thank you, NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium! A new course MAE 493G Mobile Robotics will be offered from Fall 2013.

The Vicon Motion Capture System is Up

A small 8-camera system, but a lot of fun!

Matthew Rhudy Defended His Ph.D. Dissertation

Congratulations! Dr. Rhudy!

Finally we have some room

After 6 month of waiting, we finally have our lab room entirely cleaned up yesterday. Next week, we will have the new Vicon motion capture system installed. I will upload the before and after photos later!