Objects Detected

We have been making progress at a fast clip over the past few months. Here is a quick update since the last post around 6 weeks ago:

1. The vehicle concept design is ready (will post as soon as our designer is happy with the finishing touches)
2. P0 (Prototype Zero) is finalised. We should get it fabricated in a few weeks now. The idea is to make a simple flatbed chassis (with the right proportions) that allows us to test our vehicle acceleration and steering. Also, it gives us something real to play around with where we can mount some sensors or try a control algorithm on a real vehicle inside our office.
3. Choosing a motor to drive our vehicle has been major focus too. The P0 will see a couple of BLDC motors driving it but we are quite eager to see if we can design our own induction motor that gives us similar power to weight ratio, latency and average efficiency. The charger and battery design are running in parallel.

But the highlight is on the autonomy side. In our simulation environment, the we are able to create a collision free path (static obstacles only so far). And we detected our first objects in the real world too. We have been gathering data on Malleswaram roads, and this is what we see so far

Objects Detected on a Malleswaram Road

We have also made some good progress on our controller. The new one we made last week makes some beautifully smooth trajectories. Just look at this

Making a U-turn in our simulation

Looks like we should be able to have some more fun on the P0 than we planned to.