Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles

Francisco Rovira Más is an associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain. After receiving his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he joined the Intelligent Vehicle Systems group of Deere and Company in Moline and Urbandale, USA, between 2003 and 2005. His research interests are autonomous vehicles; machine vision with special emphasis in stereoscopic vision; off-road equipment automation and controls; field robotics; and artificial intelligence. Qin Zhang is a professor, senior scientist and senior automation engineer at Washington State University, Prosser, USA. He received his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are automated and autonomous agricultural machinery technologies; intelligent agricultural machinery controls; on-machinery crop health sensing technologies; machinery-area network technologies; and agricultural infotronics technologies. Alan C. Hansen is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. He received his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. His research areas are diesel engine and tractor performace; biofuels and diesel engine combustion; simulation modeling of in-field grain handling systems; and machine vision.

1. Introduction.- 2. Off-road Vehicle Dynamics.- 3. Global Navigation Systems.- 4. Local Perception Systems.- 5. Three-dimensional Perception and Localization.- 6. Communication Systems for Off-road Intelligent Vehicles.- 7. Electrohydraulic Steering Control.- 8. Design of Intelligent Systems.