Design and engineer the Controller and planner for the E-rick

Abstract

An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle which has the capabilities to move from one location to another with the help of inputs from various sensors connected to a computer which are used to plan the path for the vehicle, without any human intervention. The goal of this project is to make an autonomous vehicle for Indian roads, and provide last mile connectivity in India for everyone. The vehicle being currently used is a Electric Rickshaw which runs on three 48V DC Batteries. This project is the first step toward making the rick autonomous. Controlling the rick involves controlling three components: steering, throttle and brakes. Here we have controlled two out of these three components, the throttle and the steering. The steering is controlled by a Roboteq Next Generation controller and the throttle is controlled by a simple circuit comprising of few wires, capacitors and an Arduino board. The whole process works on the Robot Operating System (ROS), where with the help of a Lidar sensor coordinate values are obtained and on the basis of these values and an occupancy matrix (generated using obstacle cloud information), the planner publishes control values to the rick’s steering and throttle to move it to the next goal, until the final goal is reached.