Hardware latency investigation for an autonomous miniature vehicle

This work analyzes the generated latency times during data acquisition, data processing and vehicle motion provided by hardware components of a customized autonomous miniature vehicle (AMV). The main requirement of AMV is to follow the path and the dynamics of the vehicle in front area. In order to meet these tasks, a software with variable sampling rate of the control system, according to the distance between the master and slave vehicles, was developed. In order to satisfy all dynamical specifications, the delay and reaction times must be very short [1], [4]. The system stability and the dynamic performance of the electronic control unit [2] depends on the time delays and lags due to the sensor communications, processing algorithm and actuator dynamics. In this electronic chain, the sensors and actuators are the slowest, so the paper focuses specifically on them.