Designing a cost-effective Autonomous Vehicle Control System Kit (AVCS Kit)

Autonomous vehicles are equipped with a variety of instrumentations, sensors and controls depending upon the mission of the target vehicle. One of the biggest challenges in developing autonomous vehicles system is their cost. Often times, researchers with limited budget do not have the resources to acquire realistic autonomous vehicle test platforms for carrying out their experiments on. Most researchers become limited to conduct their research in simulation environments or use small toy cars that do not accurately represent the real system. This paper describes the design of a low-cost Autonomous Vehicle Control System Kit (AVCS Kit) using inexpensive microcontrollers, encoders, motor controllers, LIDAR, and camera. The main focus of the project was to determine how much capability could be achieved on designing the AVCS Kit to transform a normal kids'-ride-on electric car to an autonomous vehicle research platform. As presented in the paper, with the use of commercially available components we were able to achieve a good performance system at a minimal cost. In the last section, the paper demonstrates the application of the AVCS kit for an autonomous vehicle lane-following and obstacle avoidance research experiment that was developed using this platform.