Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Rsl Rover: Robotic Systems Laboratory Rugged Offroad Vehicle For Experimental Research, Garrett Bonner, Owen Hale, Julian Pitt, Andrew Torrellas

Mechanical Engineering Senior Theses

The goal of this project was to build an autonomous vehicle testbed for the Robotics Systems Laboratory. This testbed will be used by undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers to test different control methods, sensor combinations, vehicle control laws, and eventually autonomous navigation. This paper documents our accomplishments to achieve this goal; we built a hierarchical control system, robust actuator mounts, and an effective safety system. The result is a capable 6-wheeled offroad vehicle that can be electronically controlled by remote or directly by wire. A feed-forward control law was incorporated for speed control, yielding predictable performance given a desired speed. …