Intelligent Ground Vehicles Completion
2018 and 2019
MAKING OF EKLAVYA
We as team Autonomous Ground Vehicles, IIT Kharagpur took part in the International Ground Vehicles Competition in the year 2018 and 2019. It takes place in Oakland University, Michigan every year. The problem statement is making an autonomous robot which can navigate lanes, avoid obstacles and collect GPS waypoints. The total work was divided into three main modules
1) Vision
2) Perception and Planning
3 )Controls
Vision
The main objective of the vision module was giving a waypoint to the planning module. The lane features were extracted using combination of various image channels. A lane model estimate was determined(linear or parabolic). The lane model parameters were determined using RANSAC, an iterative algorithm, which is robust to outliers.
Planning and Perception
A variety of sensors were mounted on the robot, including a lidar and a front facing camera. Using these sensors, a costmap of the surrounding area was build. Path planning was carried out using the waypoint generated by the vision module. A global path estimate was first made over which a local path was planned considering the vehicle dynamics and state.
Controls
The main goal of this module was to traverse the vehicle over the desired trajectory. A Low level controller used a simple PID controller to actuate the motors, while a high level controls algorithm called MPC(Model Predictive Control) was used to generate the velocity profile over the inputted trajectory.
A team of 15-20 people worked for over a month during both the summers to carry out the product development using a Lean Ideology->
CODE -> Test ->Feedback -> CODE
I had plenty of sleepless nights during these 2 months, and obviously learnt a lot from this experience.
Things I learnt include ROS, Sensor fusion, Parallel programming using a GPU, Optimization, Computer Vision, Planning algorithms like A-star, Dijkstra, DWA etc and control algorithms like Linear Quadratic Regulator, Pure Pursuit, Model Predictive Control, etc