In this letter, we present a strategy for autonomous docking of autonomous vehicles in three-dimensional space. Docking is a safety-critical task and requires expert piloting skills. Vehicles with autonomous docking capabilities are highly desirable in various applications, such as marine vehicle docking, aerial vehicle docking, spacecraft docking, and landing. To dock autonomously with the docking station, the vehicle must align itself to a specific desired orientation relative to the docking station and also reduce speed as it approaches. The vehicle achieves near-zero speed to dock successfully and safely without colliding with the docking station. Inspired by the philosophies from the guidance literature, we present a finite-time sliding mode-based strategy to achieve the same. The range and line-of-sight kinematics relations describing the motion of the vehicle with respect to the stationary docking station are used to steer the vehicle to achieve the desired orientation for docking. This docking strategy is validated in MATLAB\textsuperscript{\textregistered} simulations for various initial locations and orientations of both the vehicle and the docking station.
Understanding human responses to autonomous vehicle (AV) behaviors is essential for socially aware interaction, which is crucial for socially compatible navigation in shared traffic environments. We characterize human driving responses in interactions with AVs as feedback laws ov…
This paper introduces a digital-twin (DT)-assisted cooperative perception framework designed to improve perception accuracy under end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints and to balance perception accuracy and E2E latency under communication resource constraints in autonomous vehicle…
The assessment of planktonic standing stocks and microorganism structures is critical for understanding upper ocean biological processes. Currently, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with in-situ optical imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) methods offer a promis…
In autonomous driving development, a perception dataset is crucial, as it provides fundamental data for training, testing, and validating algorithms for an autonomous vehicle's multimodal perception systems. So far, most research has concentrated on providing datasets for well-st…
This paper contributes to vehicle dynamics modeling by introducing a physics-informed neural state-space model tailored for the parking regime of a production battery-electric sedan, identified entirely from field-test maneuvers. At parking speeds the model captures what the kine…
Autonomously controlling and handling a vehicle at and beyond its stability limit is a mathematically and computationally demanding task. Prior demonstrations of automated drifting have been limited to research platforms with instantaneous torque delivery and independently actuat…