A few guys from Rutgers showed up at Maker Faire with Navi, their vehicle for the 2012 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. Powered by two huge lead acid batteries, Navi features enough high-end hardware to hopefully make it through or around just about any terrain.
Loaded up with a laser range finder, a stereo camera setup, compass, GPS receiver, and a pair of motors capable of pulling 40A, Navi has the all the hardware sensors required to make it around a track with no human intervention. Everything is controlled by a small netbook underneath the control panel, itself loaded up with enough switches and an 8×32 LED matrix to be utterly incomprehensible.
In the videos after the break, the guys from Rutgers show off the systems that went into Navi. There’s also a video showing off Navi’s suspension, an impressive custom-built wishbone setup that will hopefully keep Navi on an even keel throughout the competition.
Also of note: A PDF design report for Navi and Navi’s own blog.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk9x00MtHII&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTO-CDAPRoA&w=470]
And why wasn’t this running in the Power Racing Series exhibition race??
Cost? The Hokuyo alone is 10 times the budget of the PPPRS cars.
Autonomous it cam be, but not intelligent.
*can, not cam. (-_-)
Uhhh, Netbook my ass! “8 gigs of ram” with an “i7 processor”, and a 1 GB graphics gard!
Also, this is kind of sad that they’re dumping so much hardware into something that’s already been solved with less hardware (and more impressively solved at that).
graphics card*