Autopilot — An autonomous navigation system

In this work an autonomous navigation system to empower a ground mobile robot to drive itself autonomously on a predefined course was developed. The navigation system implementation is described and relevant testing experiments are presented. Furthermore, graphical users interface (GUI), comprising the entire system positioning, navigation and control systems was developed for the commodity of the users. This GUI also provides an interface to allow the robot movement to be tracked on a map. The motion control is achieved using several 1D and 2D Kalman filters, where the different IMU sensors signals are combined and filtered, in order to obtain a probabilistic evaluation of the position of the robot platform. Evaluation tests confirming the ability of the robot to autonomously reach the pre-designated points are presented, showing that the validity of the approach.