Welcome
My name is Steven Peters, and I'm a mechanical engineer who enjoys researching robot cars and energy technology, among other things. I currently work as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Robotic Mobility Group at MIT.
You can read more about me, or see a list of my publications, or see some of the research projects I've worked on.
You can see some recent things I've been working on below.
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Trajectory tracking control for front-steered ground vehicles
February 25, 2012tags: vehicle-safety, hazard-avoidance
The ability to follow a desired trajectory is an important part of many autonomous vehicle navigation and hazard avoidance systems. An important requirement for trajectory tracking controllers is appropriate consideration of the vehicle dynamics, especially with regard to wheel slip. When wheel slip is small, the vehicle dynamics are greatly ...
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Stabilizing a vehicle near rollover
May 01, 2010tags: vehicle-safety, rollover
While at MIT, I took a course on Underactuated Robotics, taught by Russ Tedrake. A robot is underactuated if it has fewer actuators than degrees of freedom. While it is more challenging to control underactuated robots than fully actuated robots, there can be advantages to designing robots as underactuated. The ...
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Semi-autonomous hazard avoidance with MPC
June 01, 2009tags: vehicle-safety, hazard-avoidance
During the early part of my PhD research, I worked with Sterling Anderson on a project to develop a semi-autonomous hazard avoidance system for passenger vehicles. The goal was to make a system that would allow drivers to have full control during normal driving situations but with the capability of ...
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MIT Energy Map
September 01, 2007tags: energy-map, data-visualization, programming
As a graduate student at MIT, I noticed that many of the buildings on campus were old and had inefficient features like single-pane windows. Out of curiosity and a desire to see which buildings were most in need of retrofits, I helped create the MIT Energy Map with Elsa Olivetti ...
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Rollover Simulations
February 01, 2007tags: vehicle-safety, rollover
As part of the research for my Master's thesis, I studied the dynamics of vehicle rollover in on-road and off-road conditions. This study was based on a mathematical analysis of vehicle dynamics and high-fidelity vehicle dynamics simulations using the software MSC.ADAMS. The simulations shown below are based on ...
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