The strategy was relatively straightforward: Start with a capable platform, we used the HPI Savage Flux with a laptop, webcam, GPS, and IMU strapped on top. A Teensy USB was coded to read RC servo inputs, write servo outputs, talk to the IMU over I2C, and read the bump sensor while connecting to the laptop over USB. A simple Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) kept a global world position using GPS in UTM coordinate space. The car followed trajectories using pure pursuit for steering and a PID controller around velocity. The trajectories were layed out ahead of time with a simple lua script that pointed them towards each of the cones in a series using Dubin’s curves. A separate target tracker maintained UKFs for one or more visible cones which were culled from a simple visual filter. Once a cone was certain enough, and in the right location, the trajectory tracker switched to making trajectories aiming at the cones and slowing down, until a forward facing bump sensor tripped. At that point, the car moved on to the next element in its sequence.

The biggest thing we didn’t even include in our design was obstacle detection or avoidance. With the u-blox GPS we used, we were able to achieve positioning performance that would usually constrain the car to within +- 1.5m of a desired path, which, together with careful manual planning, was mostly enough to keep it from running into things. This was helped by the fact that the landscape for current RoboMagellan events is relatively forgiving, having few dynamic obstacles which aren’t people.

The two biggest failings in the design were that 1) we ran out of time to tune the velocity and acceleration control to get the car to reach its speed performance. In the end, with the controller we had, we tuned the constants a bit to achieve a top speed around 5-7mph, but we were limited by how quickly the controller could slow down. The underlying platform is capable of 40mph+ with rapid (~4 m/s^2) acceleration. Second, was the mechanism behind homing on cones. The target tracking filter operated in the global coordinate system. However, while our u-blox was pretty good, it would often drift rapidly by several meters in one direction or another, which could confuse the filter and cause the car to miss the cone. Higher level logic caused it to retry, but every retry added a significant time penalty as changing directions is slow on the RC car platform.

In preparing for future competitions, we’re working on getting Savage Solder both so that it performs up to our original design, and also so that it can avoid some subset of dynamic obstacles, possibly just using a similar visual tracker so that it is capable of competing in events such as Sparkfun’s AVC.