Drive by Wire Conversion

Not every vehicle comes with drive by wire.

During the recent Darpa Grand Challenge 2005, the Red Team from CMU and the team by Stanford U uses commercial available vehicle and converted them to drive by wire. The Red Team uses a HUMMV while the Standford uses a SUV.

I find it easier to get a vehicle off the shelf rather than develop one. There are a lot of good car manufacturers. Before selection consider the following:

Cost,
Space and payload
Speed
Controls available - Throttle, Brake, Steer and Brake.

I will talk more about these controls later.

About Me

As an engineer, I always gets questions on how I do this and how I do that.

I graduate with a post graduate degree in Control Engineering. Prior to that, I am trained as a Electrical and Electronics engineer in my first degree.

I have worked as an engineer for more than 10 years, working on various projects. During the recent years, my involvement is in the area of robotics, in particular, unmanned ground vehicles. It involve discipline from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, communication engineering, to research in control algorithms, navigation, vision, pose estimation, learning algorithms, sensor fusions etc.

I am fortunate to be able to work with research institutes and various industries on a number of such vehicles for the past 6 years.Currently, besides the technical lead, I also manage such projects. My two recent projects is on a unmanned Polaris All Terrain Vehicle, a 1-Tonne wheel vehicle, as well as developing learning algorithms for a robot developed by CMU. Another new project, which just began is to build a low cost 30kg autonomous robot.

I hope to share, as much as I can and without revealing "secrets" abouts these projects.