Departments involved
KCIRI Team and Dept of Automobile Engineering
Abstract:
An Autonomous Vehicle (AV) is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving safely with little or no human input. They combine a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings, such as LIDAR, GPS and Inertial Measurement Units. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles. Kumaraguru Centre for Industrial Research and Innovation, a fully funded professional research body by the management of Kumaraguru College of Technology, has taken up a project of developing an Autonomous Vehicle. The Aim of our team is to develop an Autonomous Campus Utility Vehicle, which can have multipurpose utility such as – Intra College Transport Shuttle, Information bot, etc. We have purchased a Golf Cart from Roots Ltd, Coimbatore. The Golf Cart is propelled by a 48V Permanent Magnet DC Motor. As a first step of realizing our goal, we have converted a manually operated Golf Cart into a Tele Operated one. A base station is set up to control the vehicle from a remote location. We used a Logitech Gaming Wheel for controlling Steering, Braking, Throttling and other accessories of the Golf cart. Communication between the base station and the Vehicle is established through Rocket M5 Antennae, which operates in the frequency of 5 Ghz and a dBi of 13. The Vehicle has multiple sub systems such as, Steering, Braking and throttle, which are interconnected by Controller Area Network. The Main, Master Processor employed in the Golf Cart is NVIDIA JETSON TX2. Each Sub system usually employs STM 32 Nucleo F103RB CAN Network also is built upon above Micro processor.
Further the Golf cart was operated in Autonomous mode through Computer Vision Technology. Lane detection is done through algorithms and the vehicle is made to run in Autonomous mode within the Lane limits.
Application:
Campus Transport Shuttle