Title: Development of a robotic driver for autonomous vehicle following

Authors: Nicholas Wong, Christopher Chambers, Karl Stol, Roger Halkyard

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract: This paper presents the development of autonomous control of a passenger vehicle for vehicle following using a robotic driver. The aim is to have a modular and transferable device that can autonomously control a standard passenger car. The robot controls the car in the same way as a human driver, by rotating the steering wheel and pushing the pedals. No permanent modification is required for the host car to be driven by the robotic driver. The robot uses PID controllers for both steering and pedal actuators. Information for motion control is provided by a 6-axis inertial measurement unit with integrated GPS and information about the environment is provided by a laser scanner. The open source Player Project is used as the framework for the controlling software and for simulation of control algorithms. The robotic driver has been tested on a rolling road dynamometer for accelerator and braking response.

Keywords: vehicle following; robotic drivers; longitudinal control; lateral control; autonomous vehicles; passenger vehicles; vehicle control; PID control; motion control; simulation; accelerator response; braking response; vehicle braking; vehicle acceleration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2010.030205

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2010 Vol.8 No.1/2/3/4, pp.276 - 287

Published online: 11 Dec 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article