Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation

Autonomous Systems

Autonomous systems group has been conducting hands-on research on physical heavy-duty semi-autonomous machines and autonomous mobiles robots, mainly in agriculture and forestry, for more than two decades. The group specializes in situational awareness, machine perception, SLAM, path planning, navigation, model predictive control, and multi-robot systems related issues in dynamic environments.
Autonomous systems Group

For forest harvesters, a perception system that is capable of forest SLAM, i.e. mapping the trees and localizing the machine, has been developed. The group has developed different utilizing schemes for the tree map information. Stereo vision and image sequence analysis, i.e. motion vision, have an important role in these developments.

Robotization of silvicultural machines has been studied. The aim is to recognize the young trees that should be left to grow, and other trees that can be cut down, with the help of machine vision and laser scanners, as well as instrumentation and automatic motion control of the forestry boom. The developments have been tested with real machines.

For agricultural tractor and implement combinations, several prototypes of ISOBUS networked (ISO 11783) control systems for implements have been realized, in which automatic GPS based precision agriculture, semiautomatic integrated control and control system development have been studied and demonstrated. Path planning, automatic navigation and model predictive control path tracking have been developed.

Several small agricultural field robots have been built in student projects, which have participated in European Field Robot Event contest. A full-scale agricultural field robot is used to study online path planning.

The group is led by Professor Arto Visala.

Projects

Latest publications

Estimation of the height profile of the path for autonomous driving in terrain

Tabish Badar, Issouf Ouattara, Juha Backman, Arto Visala 2024 Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter using Noise Adaptive Kalman Filter for Fully Mixing State-Space Models

Tabish Badar, Simo Sarkka, Zheng Zhao, Arto Visala 2024 IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Vehicle modeling and state estimation for autonomous driving in terrain

Tabish Badar, Juha Backman, Arto Visala 2024 Control Engineering Practice

AL– a Prototype Autonomous Ship Model for Navigating in Ice Conditions

Victor Bolbot, Andrei Sandru, Ture Saarniniemi, Jan Hendrik Freter, Otto Puolakka, Pentti Kujala, Osiris Valdez Banda 2024 ASME 43rd International Conference on Ocean, Offshore & Arctic Engineering

Low Temperature Combustion Modeling and Predictive Control of Marine Engines

Amin Modabberian, Xiaoguo Storm, Amir-Mohammad Shamekhi, Aneesh Vasudev, Kai Zenger, Jari Hyvönen, Maciej Mikulski 2024 Applied Sciences (Switzerland)

A Review of Applications of Machine Learning for Emissions Estimation in Diesel Engines

Hoang Nguyen Khac, Thuy Linh Nguyen 2024 Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Networks - ICISN 2024

Estimation of 3D form of the Path for Autonomous Driving in Terrain

Tabish Badar, Issouf Ouattara, Juha Backman, Arto Visala 2023 IFAC-PapersOnLine

Small Unmanned Surface Vessels— A Review and Critical Analysis of Relations to Safety and Safety Assurance of Larger Autonomous Ships

Victor Bolbot, Andrei Sandru, Ture Saarniniemi, Otto Puolakka, Pentti Kujala, Osiris Valdez Banda 2023 Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

A multi-objective optimization strategy for timber forwarding in cut-to-length harvesting operations

Eero Holmström, Jussi Nikander, Juha Backman, Kari Väätäinen, Jori Uusitalo, Paula Jylhä 2023 International Journal of Forest Engineering
More information on our research in the Aalto research portal.
Research portal
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