Title of Project: Development of GPS Navigation System for an Intelligent Ground Vehicle, Viper
Type: Research
Guide: CJ Chung
The Intelligent Grounded Vehicle Competition is the premiere university level unmanned ground vehicle competition in the world. As part of IGVC, Navigation Challenge requires vehicles maneuver using GPS coordinates to target destinations while avoiding obstacles. Viper Team of Lawrence Tech won a 2nd place in Autonomous Challenge and completed JAUS Level 3 Challenge; however, our performance in Navigation Challenge was not quite perfect. In this project Ze Cheng with the help of Brian Koroncey and last year's member Shawn Ellison will work on improving performance in the coming IGVC competition in June 2009. Several directions are going to be worked on to improve the current program for Navigation Challenge: 1) vision detection to help with avoiding obstacles, which means the implementation of the camera 2) the implementation of Dijkstra's Algorithm to decide the order of visiting the destinations 3) we will try to transfer current path-finding algorithm A* to a dynamical algorithm B*4) A Fuzzy Logic control module will be developed to navigate the vehicle. In the end we are going to publish a paper for Unmanned Systems North America 2009 Symposium & Exhibition, Washington, DC, August 10-13, 2009.