ATLASCAR

Friday, February 21, 2014

Introduction

Context:

This work is inserted into the ATLAS project of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Aveiro in the context of developing an improved odometry system. This kind of systems is very common and has a important role in the control of autonomous vehicles.
To be able to develop autonomous driving applications, driving assistance, monitoring of risk and maneuvers aboard a car, it is necessary that the computerized systems have access to good estimates of the vehicles movements, in particular the displacement on the road. Some modern vehicles already got this type of information but most of the circulating vehicles don't. So, there is the necessity to create a system to estimate the position of the vehicle wheels using odometry. The main goal of this thesis work is to develop this solution, which must be able to be installed in an easy and non invasive way on most of the vehicles.

Main tasks:
  • familiarization with the current systems of the AtlasCar;
  • Study of the state of the art in navigation solutions with odometry;
  • Study and selection of the most appropriate odometry solution to the goals;
  • Selection and implementation of sensors and data acquisition systems;
  • Project of the odometry unit(s) based in the defined solutions;
  • Development of software and a communication protocol with the central system;
  • Implementation, testing and monitoring of the systems.
This project will be developed in the next months with orientation of Prof. Doc. Vitor Santos and co-orientation of Doc. Ricardo Pascoal. 

ATLASCAR

"ATLAS is a project created by the Group of Automation and Robotics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Aveiro, Portugal. The mission of the ATLAS project is to develop and enable the proliferation of advanced sensing and active systems designed for implementation in automobiles and affine platforms. Advanced active systems being improved, or newly developed, use data from vision, laser and other sensors. The ATLAS project has vast experience with autonomous navigation in controlled environments and is now evolving to deal with real road scenarios. To ensure that the developments are meeting the ATLAS project mission statement, a full sized prototype, the ATLASCAR 1, has been equipped with several state of the art sensors."

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