Control Engineering

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The Reading Room
September 7, 2007

The Reading Room

Solving a technical problem, such as the one of demonstrating a driverless Army supply truck, requires a lot of reading. To acomodate this activity here at AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL MAGIC, we have created a technical library complete with the sixteen foot high ceiling and walls lined with books as high as a tall person can reach, above that framed inspirational pictues of submarines, robots, cruise missiles, souvineers of the earlier DARPA races and assorted other things of engineering interest.  Running down the ceter of the large room are the file cabinets containing the vertical files and long library tables with a variety of computers with high speed internet access and their displays.  This is afterall the internet age.  AIM Team members from around the world check in by computer, update the Traverse City shop on their progress, put in their requests for materials or assistance etc.

The stacks area contain back issues of one hundred and thirty five engineering and scientific technical journals.  Many of them containing articles about the individual technologies required by driverless vehicles.  The technical library and stacks are brightly lit, humidity controlled, quiet, cool and a rack of office supplies are close at hand should someone need a notebook, pen, pencil, protractor, dividers, drafting scales, chart paper, tracing paper, staples, glue, brass fasteners, report covers, etc. 

While I talk about what we are doing here at AIM, it is not much different than what each of the 89 other teams are doing.  While teams who are closer to engineering libraries don't have to create their own as we did, access to a well run technical libary is essential.  High speed internet connection is essential.  A place to be inspired, to imagine how the parts will fit together and to sketch it all out on paper or CAD is what we have tried to create for the volunteers working here.

Can the sophisticated behavior of a human driver really be broken down into a handfull of reflex actions?   
There are only four controls available to a driver, human or not, who drives a vehicle.  They are : stop/go, forward/reverse, left/right, and park.  All the driving situations in the world are dealt with using those few choices.   What the driver does is pretty simple too and may be looked at as a collection of simple behaviours such as:  Avoid objects that the vehicle can not driver over, stay in the lane, stay under the speed limit, stop at the stop signs marked and follow the best path to the next waypoint.

The trick here is to avoid all those people who say it can not be done and focus on the simplest, most straight forward way of acomplishing the tasks, one at a time.  



This is a picture of Team #26, Martian Mentors' equipment rack inside their vehicle MAX.

A few batteries, a PC, a few relays, and a power inverter is the bulk of what it takes to automate a vehicle.  Small independent teams are proving that it is not nearly as complicated or as expensive to automate a vehicle as earlier predictions had estimated. 

Posted by Paul Grayson on September 7, 2007 | Comments (0)