Project Details

Problem Statment

Our client Dr.Nghiem is the the director at the Intelligent Control Systems (ICONS) Laboratory on the campus of Northern Arizona Universtiy (NAU). He has two graduate students helping him with theory, advanced algorithms for intelligent and high-performance control systems. These systems are at the core of many complex and critical engineering systems, including in energy and infrastructure, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, healthcare and many other industries.

Flagstaff’s F1/10 Robo-Racing Project (FF1RR) goals are to promote education and training in controls, advanced robotics, and autonomous vehicles at NAU and in the Flagstaff area. This project will develop a course on autonomous vehicles for NAU students to study the technology behind autonomous vehicles. It will also develop and organize an annual STEM summer camp to introduce the technology of autonomous vehicles, and smart transportation in general, to school students in Flagstaff. The course and the STEM camp will be based on the F1/10th autonomous race car platform and custom software programs developed in the project.

The barrier of entry to the field of autonomous driving is steep. The hardware needed to get started is expensive and most of the time requires the user to wire and solder all the components together. The F1/10 platform was made to be a cheap, scaled-down version of a Formula 1 car but still cost upwards of $3,000. For entry-level autonomy, many open source projects work but require an extensive background in coding and Linux. Almost all of the said solutions use ROS to control the robot and handle all sensors.

ROS is one of the main hurdles when learning robotics. It is the most used robotic framework in industries across the world. ROS was created to be a global collaboration to make the field of robotics more accessible. Its modular design allows users to choose packages that will be useful to them and implement their solutions. To use ROS, everything is done through a command-line interface. On top of knowing all of ROS's commands users need to be comfortable with Linux commands.

The current problems are:

• Overly Complicated
• Disconnected Configuration
• No Emergency Stop

With fixing these problems listed above we are able to make the learning availbe to all types of high school students. This will help get the next generation involved in the advancing technology future.