Design of a Manned-Unmanned Teaming System and Forward-Formation Control for Crevasse Detection in the Path of a Human-Driven Vehicle

This paper proposes a Man-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) system, which is designed to protect manned vehicles traveling in Antarctica from hazards such as crevasse by collaborating with a crevasse exploration robot. Additionally, it introduces a forward-formation between the manned vehicle and the exploration robot within the MUM-T system. In the forward-formation, the exploration robot, acting as the follower, moves ahead of the manned vehicle, which serves as the leader of the formation, to explore crevasses along the anticipated route. The follower predicts the leader’s expected path using its state information, generates a desired position, and tracks that position. For the tracking control of the crevasse exploration robot, the kinematic model based velocity command is employed. The stability and performance of the proposed MUM-T system, forward-formation, and motion control algorithm are validated through simulations. Especially, the forward-formation demonstrated more than an 86% improvement in predicting and mimicking the leader’s trajectory compared to conventional formation strategies. Finally, the field test results in Antarctica confirmed the high practical applicability of the proposed forward-formation-based MUM-T system.