While sitting across from a beautiful ocean with the wind blowing across my face and my eyes peering at a screen of moving electrons, I concluded that it was due time to post my plan for my Senior Project.
Overview: I am going to take a remote-controlled car and modify it with a micro-controller and distance sensors so that it will be able to drive itself around with minimal collisions.
Deeper Summary: As I have said, I am building an autonomous car. My car will not have the roughly 3.2 m3 interior volume of the Toyota Prius. Instead, I am taking a remote controlled car as a base and installing two components in it that, with some software, should make the car autonomous. The reason for using an RC car as a base is that it comes already with a chassis and motors. I merely need to hook up a micro-controller (mini computer) to the motors to hijack their functionality and control them myself.
Stage One: The first stage in my plan is to find an RC car and dismantle it. The ideal car will be decent-sized, will be spacious under the plastic shell, and will provide easy access to motors which are easily hijacked. Inside an RC car is a circuit board used to communicate with the remote control. This board will be obsolete with my build, so I can yank it out and replace it with my micro-controller.
Stage Two: I will then proceed to attach the motors to my micro-controller. I won't know how to specifically do this until I take the RC car apart and look at the motors, but the best case will be that I just need to strip and then plug the motor wires into the micro-controller. The worst case would be getting whole new motors, or having to get a separate motor control board to drive the motors. I will also need to provide power to the micro-controller. During the build phase this can be done with an external power supply, but when I finish I will need to find a way to make the power supply of the RC car compatible with my micro-controller. Once the motors are connected, I will need to write a program for the micro-controller to test the motors to make sure everything works.
Stage Three: With the motors working, it will be time to think about my object detection sensors. I am considering two types of sensors right now - infrared and sonar. I will need to perform some tests to decide which type of sensor will be best used for my car, and then I will need to attach it to the car.
Stage Four: By this point I will be almost done. With the sensors working and attached to my car, all that is left is to write the program that will drive the car around and avoid hitting objects. By the time I have reached this stage, I hope to have come up with a novel solution that I can program efficiently.
Final Stage: With everything working, I expect to have enough time left to play with my car. Using wood blocks or bricks, I can set up a box with obstacles in it and let the car drive itself around without collisions.
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So that is my plan. We'll see how it goes and I will be sure to post my progress as I progress. I don't plan to start for another week or two, but until then I will put up a post talking about the micro-controller I have ordered, as well as the two types of sensors I plan to test.
'Til next time, stay classy!
Next: Senior Project: How Stuff Works
Sources Consulted: [1].
