Funded by Private Sector – Vintage 1986 Mercedes Benz 250
Funded by Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University – 120,000 THB (3,500 USD)
Collaboration with Thai Robotics Society
The project is to develop an unmanned automobile which is capable to drive autonomously along an open road with steady obstacles. The studies are separated in stages; starting with a modified ATV, and a real automobile. The unmanned vehicle is equipped with three parts which are Sensing System, Actuating System, and Control and Computational System. The Sensing System consists of a stereo-camera (Bumble Bee®) for main navigation, a number of low-cost GPS with statistical computational software for filtering, 2 fire-wire cameras for road-edge detection in low-level control, and other electronic sensors (i.e. e-compass, encoders, accelerometers). The vehicle has been modified to control its breaking system, steering system, and powering system. The control and computational unit is using a PC (Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 with 2 GB RAM) to process the computer vision subsystems, to acquire all sensing data, to calculate the path-motion planning, and decision making subsystems, and to control the Actuating system.
