Project Description

This image above supplied by Professor Wang and Professor Feher was the initial state of the Picar given to our group minus the 3D printed part on the front of the car.

The objective of this project was to use a combination of code, sensors, servos, and motors to have the Picar complete different tasks that we came up with. Initially the tasks we created were the following:

Task 1: Have the Picar drive the designated path on the quad. Starting at A and ending at A. This path also included an obstacle avoidance part, at point B there are two bollards on the sidewalk that the car would have to avoid.

Task 2: Have the Picar drive in an empty part of the quad, as seen in the above photo, and spell the selected word that was entered.

Task 3: Have the Picar drive and navigate the Sim City.(A video of the city can be seen on the Video/Photo page)

During the course of this semester we worked hard to get these tasks done, but only managed to partially do Task 3. We got the Picar to drive in the Sim City and avoid obstacles but could not get the car to fully navigate the Sim City. The video below is a sample of the car driving in the Sim City and stopping when it detected an obstacle. The string attached to the car was a precaution to stop the car if it was about to run into something it could not detect.

The car managed to drive a small part of the city due to it using the lidar to detect obstacles. The lidar had a detection range of 360. This was broken into 4 parts the car could detect. The code used these parts to tell the car to:

  1. Turn left if something was detected on the right side.
  2. Turn right if something was detected on the left side.
  3. Stop if something was detected in front of it.
  4. Stop if something was detected behind the car.

Besides for the Tasks the other part of the project was to fix the Picar and make it better then what was given to us. The final car looked like this:

The changes from the first car, photo at the top of this page, and the photo above are as follows.

  1. New Frame to hold the Raspberry Pi, Pihat and lidar.(Frame was already printed by TA’s, jut needed to use it.)
  2. New/resoldered battery cables to prevent meltdown.
  3. New mounts that attached the Raspberry Pi, Pihat, and lidar to the new frame.
  4. Different battery.
  5. servo mount needed adjustment to be mounted better.
  6. New camera mount (courtesy of another group)