Micro-Controlled Autonomous Vehicle Group

Our purpose is to design and build an autonomous microcontrolled land vehicle. It will be able to navigate from a given starting point to a desired location avoiding obstacles in its way. The course we plan to operate in has a flat surface and no more than five static obstacles. Our design considerations are the vehicle platform, motors, type of microcontroller, obstacle avoidance sensors, navigational sensors, and basic program behavior. We chose the Handy Board to control out vehicle, which is based on the Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller. It is a universal board that will meet our interfacing requirements. Obstacles will be detected using four infrared sensors places around the front of the vehicle. Four algorithms for completing out goal are discussed. We chose to use a navigation method involving optical encoders to determine distance and direction traveled. This paper describes the design process for our rover, the reasons for the hardware we selected, and how these decisions successfully allowed us to achieve our objectives