Newsletter November 2017

newsletter November 2017

Driverless

Critical Milestone Reached by the Driverless Team Text: Harald Lønsethagen, Guidance & Control Team Leader

In our last newsletter, we introduced our radio controlled car. The RC-car is modified with a stereo-camera connected to a single board computer (Jetson TX1) and an Arduino Micro. The Arduino has an interface to the electronic speed controller responsible for the throttle, and directly to the servos of the RC-car for the steering. This enables us to see around the car and control the steering and throttle all by advanced algorithms implemented onto the TX1, which our driverless vehicle (DV) team members have been working hard to develop.

In short, these systems are what the autonomous system relies on.

When we finally got to testing, we were both nervous and excited. The first test ended up with the car making a constant left turn. Not the results we hoped for.

We later found out that we launched the wrong file, which made the car think it was in a simulation with the track going to the left. After this hiccup results finally started improving. We first hard coded waypoints inside the garage, and were happily surprised to see that the car actually followed them! Coincidentally our AI-specialist finished his neural network the same evening. The car was then ready for manually driving around a circular track for 15 minutes to gather

On the screen, the red line is the planned trajectory while the blue line is the driven path. The blue rectangle illustrates the position and heading of the car.

Results from the cone-detecting neural network which was trained on only 120 cone images. It struggles a bit with color as you can see. training data. Once the neural network was trained with the newly acquired data it was put to the critical test of autonomous driving. Now controlled only by the end-to-end neural network, the car was indeed successfully lead around our track! It’s an understatement to say that the atmosphere was ecstatic.

During the following tests, we soon discovered the need of a visual representation of the car’s decisions.

This was an easy enough task to resolve, and we can now see the car’s driving pattern and where it is heading. In addition, a neural network for detecting

cones has been under development. By using an already developed and trained network and consequently tuning it, we have achieved great results. After only training the network on 120 images of cones, it was able to detect most of the cones in an image. The network is still struggling with color detection, but our progress is way beyond expectations. A lot of further progress has been made, but nothing as spectacular and motivating as the the evening of our first driverless run. Some pictures from the testing has been included below.

We used what space was available to us, which proved sufficient for initial testing.

Electronics

Our Embedded Electronics Group Text: Yohann Jakob Sandvik, Electronics Team Leader Revolve’s Electronics group consists of ten members this year. The overall task of the group is to improve the low voltage systems on the vehicle, as well as continuing the development of our in-house designed motor-controller. The “low voltage system” consists of five different systems/system-groups: the Accumulator Management System (AMS), the Vehicle Control Unit (VCU), the Driver interface, the Sensory Broadcasting System (SBS), the Telemetry module, and the Safety systems.

The AMS system consists of a master-controller and twelve slave circuits. The slavecircuits have required significant changes to the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) layout to fit with the new accumulator topology. Regarding the master-controller, we have focused on only making incremental improvements. The VCU, Driver interface, Telemetry module and a significant portion of the safety systems have also focused on small, but incremental improvements to the hardware to ensure stability and reliability. The SBS has been subject to significant hardware changes to ensure a high integrity of the sensor-data broadcasted to the rest of the vehicle. We are expecting a round of prototype-PCBs in a week and are excited to start testing our new designs!

During the autumn of 2017, the two people responsible for the development of the motor controller have solved various grounding problems in the hardware and uncovered some significant design-flaws. After using a new set of power transistors, we have been able to spin the motor at 12000 RPM which is a new record for our design.

Part of our electronics group visiting one of our sponsors, Simpro, for an introduction in soldering.

Software

Software Group Text: John Chen, Software Team Leader

Software is a group which is responsible for developing and maintaining the inhouse data solution for visualizing and interpreting sensor data through telemetry from the car. The solution, Analyze has a cloud storage solution and all users of the program can easily access stored telemetry data for analysis.

Developed from scratch in C#/.NET, Analyze utilizes a few external frameworks, like Scichart and Syncfusion. With features like line graph plots, scatterplots, heat maps and more to display sensor data, Analyze can be used both for review and during live competition. Beautiful visualizations which helps to structure and effectivize the workflow of our car engineers.

Events

Revolve @ Industri Futurum Text: Aida Angell, Marketing Manager A fun part of the project involves promoting Revolve NTNU at big conferences. Our project manager, and former member Jørgen Kjær Eliassen participated at Industri Futurum. This convention offers an important meeting place for the Norwegian industry, focusing on the challenges of the future. Here Jørgen presented his work on the 3D printed titanium uprights for the 2017 race car, Eld. It’s exciting for us to see that there is a considerable interest for the technology we apply. We have many sophisticated solutions on our car and to showcase both our dedicated students and different sponsors at a conference is something we rarely say no to. At this conference prime minister Erna Solberg came and looked at our latest car. It was fun to see that Norway’s prime minister also took a liking to our project.

Photo: Industri Futurm

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