ECE Day '08 - Team 2: iCar

BU Grand Challenge: Autonomous Vehicle Navigation with Obstacle Avoidance

The task of autonomous vehicle navigation coupled with obstacle avoidance is a notoriously difficult problem involving the delicate integration with and communication between a wide variety of sensors, positional input, and a real-time vehicle control system. While there are a myriad of conceptually similar projects on the university and military scale, each undertaking has presented unique problems of all types. Our project consists of the real time communication and interaction of a variety of sensors, motors and processors, which, together, form an autonomous vehicle with obstacle avoidance capabilities. The system should ultimately enable a mobile platform to navigate a given route while avoiding obstacles in its path. This system consists of a portable digital assistant (PDA), a 32- bit microprocessor, and three different sensory devices: a GPS unit for positional data, a digital compass chipset for directional input, and four ultrasonic acoustic sensors to detect obstacles. The project uses a wide variety of communication modes, including both wired (Serial, i2c, digital I/O) and wireless (Bluetooth) communication.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Boston University
• ECE Day 2008
• engineering