This week our team worked together in the Hammerschlag Hall in order to integrate our subcomponents. We had to first fix a drift in our vehicle mechanics when driving. We spent the first half of the week working on solutions and after fine tuning the Arduino code for controlling the wheel motors we were able to minimize the car’s drift to a negligible amount. This also included tuning the car for a voltage of around 8V.
Afterwards, we focused on path planning. This consisted of ensuring that our map could easily store obstacles in order for the vehicle to evade them when it approaches it. When an object is detected, we store the coordinates in a grid and use an a* path planning algorithm in order to evade the obstacles.
Here is a video of our Autovot evading bottles in a 5 meter track.
Additionally, we spent sometime in the end of the week working on the final presentation. We are almost done with it but prioritized pushing the progress of our project and are at a very good place. Next week will include increasing the track length and adding more obstacles and testing to see how our Autovot reacts to that. Finally, we will have to test how well the following Autovot evades the obstacles using the lead car’s messages.