Implementation of kinematic control for a DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle

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Title Implementation of kinematic control for a DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle
Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Engineering
Department Mechanical Engineering
Author Hetrick, Andrew
Date 2010-02-16
Description The DARPA Urban Challenge provided a purpose for autonomous ground vehicle research in recent years. The University of Utah entered the competition with a vehicle named Red Rover. In the course of preparing for the competition a path following control technique was developed and implemented, modified from a controller found in the literature. The implementation is a kinematic controller with a feed forward term, gain scheduling and safety check, termed the error governor. Results show the necessity of the gain scheduling and governor to maintain stability through a range of operational conditions. Postcompetition efforts uncovered a saturated communications channel, whose repair greatly improved tracking performance. In addition actuator feedback was restored, which afforded the implementation of an extended Kalman filter. This filter successfully accomplishes sensor switching such that sensor measurements can be ignored when they contain false information. The filter implementation successfully smoothes state estimates and thereby achieves the underlying goal of giving the system a natural steering motion for the benefit of the passengers. An initial effort to make the onboard wheel encoders a reliable source of velocity data is also explored. However, given an eight-spoke hardware design, an acceptable solution was not found.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Autonomous robots
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name MS
Language eng
Relation is Version of Digital reproduction of "Implementation of kinematic control for a DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle" J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections TL8.5 2010 .H48
Rights Management © Andrew Hetrick, To comply with copyright, the file for this work may be restricted to The University of Utah campus libraries pending author permission.
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 28,131 bytes
Identifier us-etd2,165135
Source Original: University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections
Conversion Specifications Original scanned on Epson GT-30000 as 400 dpi to pdf using ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Professional Edition.
ARK ark:/87278/s6rj502n
Setname ir_etd
ID 192852
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6rj502n
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