Getting an Unmanned Rover Under Control
Red Rover, Red Rover, send an autonomous vehicle right over! That's exactly what mechanical engineering seniors Garrett Bonner, Owen Hale, Julian Pitt, and Andrew Torrellas are striving to do. For the past year, these four have spent countless hours in a tiny workshop building an unmanned test vehicle to be used by the School of Engineering’s Robotics Systems Laboratory (RSL).
"Right now, it is fully functional by remote control, but hopefully someday it will be autonomous like the Google car," said Torrellas. Bonner added, "We've programmed the radio module to send serial commands to the onboard XBee and range tested it the other day; it was still sending data from half a mile out. Eventually, we should get to nine miles without interference."
Getting the Rover to this stage has been quite a feat. The team inherited the vehicle from the University of California at Santa Cruz, who had received it from a privateer team who had entered it in a DARPA challenge. But rather than trying to figure out where the previous groups had gone wrong, SCU's team stripped it down and started rebuilding from the ground up. "We've got the vehicle control system working as a prototype; the first iteration of speed control is working; the architecture works, but it needs to be tuned for real-world use and packaged for rain protection, etcetera," said Pitt.
Self-described lifelong car nuts, the team is getting lots of hands-on experience in engineering disciplines outside of their major and in project management. "Using the other fields of computer and electrical engineering to implement our ideas and control the mechanical systems has been challenging," said Hale, "but it’s really been a team effort. We get on each other when we need to, but we're such a small team, we work on everything together and don’t have formal positions." Tasks are listed on a white board in the workshop; whoever wants to work on a particular item writes his name next to it, and the job gets done.
Next steps include testing at the RSL's research lab located at nearby NASA/Ames Research Center, and then passing the vehicle off to the next team of students who will add more functionality. "This vehicle will become a new research testbed for exploring automation technologies for cars and other vehicles," said the team's advisor Associate Professor and RSL Director Chris Kitts, who added, "This is certainly an exciting technology that will play an increasing role in our day-to-day lives."