New generation of scaled truck models
A new set of three scaled SCANIA truck models has been assembled for research purposes on autonomous vehicles.
The preparation of the trucks consisted on the installation of a real-time platform from National Instruments called NI myRIO. This is a versatile device for engineering educational purposes, which allows having computational autonomy onboard of the vehicle using LabVIEW or C/C++ as programming languages.
Another milestone of this project involved the use of physical and virtual sensors like sonars and the Motion Caption System (MoCap) respectively. The sonars were tested to prove their reliability on vehicle following and obstacle avoidance, giving satisfying results. The MoCap system was used for local positioning to track the current location of the trucks.
LabVIEW codes were developed to test the functionalities of the trucks by implementing a manual control using a gamepad and check features like moving forward and backwards, steering and gearbox shifting. An automatic control scenario was also developed to perform platooning or truck following between two trucks, where the leader transmitted its local position coordinates to the truck behind as a shared variable on the wireless local area network.
Carlos Pedreira
Carlos Summer Project Presentation.pdf (pdf 1.2 MB)