Design and Development of Navigation System for an Autonomous Vehicle

Soon, autonomous vehicles will become a reality. Many tech companies and automakers are competing to develop their prototypes with the expectation of becoming the first company that could launch a fully autonomous car. To demonstrate a self-driving car, this work presents a design and development of an autonomous vehicle modified from an electric golf cart and demonstrates the lateral tracking control based on a PID controller. Having level 1 autonomy, our autonomous golf cart can control steering, speed, and braking under a take-over control action requested by the driver. To reach level 2 autonomy, the autonomous golf cart gives a demonstration for testing navigation and tracking control. GNSS positioning data obtained from the RTK modules are used to manually create the desired path while driving the vehicle. For the automated driving test, a PID controller is used in the lateral tracking control system to control the golf cart to follow two straight paths in the experiment. The results show that the vehicle can smoothly track the desired path.