Section: New Results

Perception and control strategies for autonomous docking for electric freight vehicles

Participants : Joshué Pérez Rastelli, Evangeline Pollard, Vicente Milanes Montero, Fawzi Nashashibi.

The freight transportation is defined as the process of carrying goods and persons from one given point to another. Recently, urban freight transportations have been used as an alternative for the delivery problems of goods in urban environments. The present work is developed in the framework of the Furbot project (FP7), which presents a solution for future urban freight transport with new light-duty architecture with full-electrical vehicles. We focused on the onboard intelligent units, dedicated to improve the perception and control systems onboard the vehicle for the parking/docking process, considering loading and unloading phases of the freight transport procedure. Two lasers were placed on the vehicle in order to localize it with respect to the freight box. A polynomial approach is used for the trajectory planning for a smooth docking maneuver. This proposal was first tested in a 3D simulator, and then validated in a real platform. The results presented in [45] shows the good behavior of our approach, which will be implemented in the FURBOT vehicle at the end of the project.