With Pololu products onboard, my 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, “Troubled Child” drove itself to victory in a robot competition over the weekend at the 2014 Sparkfun AVC!
Yes, you read that right. We made my Jeep into an autonomous vehicle. (details here) We were very happy to field the first full size AVC – and we had 3/3 flawless runs! Needless to say, the SHARC FSV team is really happy.
For safety, I and my copilot were inside the whole time; I had brake and throttle control. The Jeep steered. We had an emergency-stop that would activate the brake failsafe. The copilot monitored my Ground Control Station for signs of error. We had a ground spotter in radio contact during the run. We ran in the enclosed AVC course on our own.
The Jeep was run by an mbed (ordered from our friends in Las Vegas) in control as well as a tried and true Pololu Step-Down Voltage Regulator D15V35F5S3 for powering the electronics and Pololu Dual Relay Board to run the warning horn and deactivate the pneumatic brake failsafe during the run.
Run 1:
Run 2:
Here are videos from inside and outside on the Jeep’s third run:
Source code is on github (here), in the FSV branch. It’s the same code base that runs Data Bus, my 1:10 scale rover, which took 3rd place back in 2012. I wrote this code to be experimenter-friendly. If you want to build your own rover, let’s talk. Come join diyrovers Google Group http://is.gd/diyrovers. There’s a bunch of us talking all things autonomous rover.