Development of a simplified automated guided electric vehicle for testing and teaching automotive systems and navigation algorithms

Electro-mobility is getting an increasing attention and progress around the world. To develop and teach artificial intelligence and automotive engineering focused on autonomous vehicles in an undergraduate level, functional and simple autonomous vehicles/platforms are required. Teaching autonomous driving is a challenging task. Indeed, most existing autonomous driving teaching activities focus on few technologies/components involved. This not only fails to provide a comprehensive coverage, but also sets a high entry barrier for students with different backgrounds. Thus, teaching and learning autonomous vehicle systems, mechatronics and programming can be very challenging for students, especially when combined with robotic vehicle design, construction and testing. The significance of this research is based on two main contributions: one is providing a new reachable and didactic technology for autonomous navigation academic purposes while the second is demonstrating its operation under different didactic and test schemes to illustrate possible practices. The vehicle consists on a full-size automotive traction, steering and braking systems assisted electronically via remote control. In addition, a basic control system was designed and implemented to avoid collision that may be caused by navigation algorithms faults. At an experimental stage, the vehicle was useful to realize basic navigation schemes acceptably.