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COYOTE

Unmanned Ground Vehicle Systems

 

The Story Thus Far...

The Coyote Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project has been going for about three years now. The Coyote system started as an entry in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge event, a contest wherein the entrants had to build completely autonomous robotic vehicles to traverse an on and off-road course roughly between Barstow, CA and Primm, NV, with nothing more than GPS signals and their own sensor inputs to guide them.

No one finished that year's event, and a new contest was anounced for October of '05. Furthermore, DARPA Director Dr. Anthony Tether decided to sweeten the pot by another $1 Million, for a total of $2 Million to the team with the fastest finish under ten hours. Stanford University came through and won the prize in '05, and did so in style.

Our entry never made it into the semi-finals of qualifying for the '05 event, even though we did turn out a few good autonomous runs during our Site Visit Qualifying. Our demise may have been the fact that we had no obstacle avoidance systems running that day. In an attempt to keep things simple, it was decided to run only sonar that day, since at the time our other sensors only came on line at speeds higher than 15 mph. Early that morning while doing practice runs for the Site Visit, the sonar processor dumped its program, rendering the three sensors useless. With no programming board on site, and no time to run and get one, we ended up "flying blind" for the day.

Despite the bad luck of that day, we continue to work to finish and perfect the system, as we see tantalizing evidence that similar competitions may be in our future. The Coyote was built for this purpose alone, so we continue to wait for opportunities to showcase and test our approach to this daunting challenge. In the meantime, we hope to expand this website. As interest in our activities grows, so does the demand for more information about what makes up the Coyote UGV. Keep checking back here for more pages, more pictures, and maybe even some video. 

WHAT'S NEXT?

We are currently working to add a drivers' seat to the car. While this might seem like a big step backwards for autonomous navigation, it will allow us to ride along and monitor the performance of the vehicle as we test it. This is something we could not do in the past, something other teams could do, and something that could greatly accelerate the testing and developement process of such a system. Other additions we have made, even since learning that the original DARPA Grand Challenge had been won, include the addition of  two Doppler Radar units for forward obstacle detection, and firmware upgrades to our protoype Scanning Laser Rangefinder from LTI.

I want to ackowledge a great team that has come together to assist us with our laser ranging instrument. Joe Cronn, Patrick Delorehy, Tony Zambai, and the whole bunch at Laser Technology, Inc. did a wonderful job optimizing the brand new Laser Rangefinder that is the basis of our Scanning Laser Instrument. For the first two years of this endeavor, LTI provided us with a Laser Instrument, and with all the technical assistance we needed to apply their unit to our system, allowing us to create a robust and effective obstacle detection system.

Finally, I have to put a word in for John Heubner, of Dix Motorsports/Speedscene.us for his continuing support. John is our machinist, and he patiently hung in there with us through some pretty demanding times.

Some of the upgrades we had made prior to the '05 event included: a faster, more robust, and more precise Steering Feedback Sensor, a much more sensitive, precise, and reliable Fluid Stabilized Magnetic Compass, an entirely new design and configuration of our Scanning Laser Rangefinder (LIDAR), a new series of faster Peripheral Microcontrollers, along with RS-485 Networking which blows away the RS-232 based communications that spelled our doom in the eleventh hour of preparations for 2004's event, and a new Parallel Control Interface for all of the vehicle's control outputs. 

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

As you can tell from the pictures, our vehicle is a cumbersome beast. Getting it out in the field for testing was getting to be a burden. Our solution was to build a  "little brother" for the Coyote, which I have dubbed "The Javelina". The Javelina is basically a small electric Go-Kart, electrically identical to the Coyote, with accomodations for all of the same computing and sensing equipment the larger car has. We are able to swap the equipment onto the little car, throw it in the bed of my pickup, and take it out for testing or just let it find its way down our driveway much more easily than we can with the larger rig. This has sped up the process of tweaking the navigation software greatly.

In case you were wondering, I arrived at the name Javelina while watching the little car poke its way along my driveway- which is exactly what I find a group of REAL javelina doing at about four o'clock every morning- except my little car doesn't finish his outings by rumaging through my garbage cans!

It is my belief that in order to have a machine drive a vehicle through an unpredictable environment, you must start with a platform that is designed to be robust and forgiving enough to be driven within the limits of your sensing and processing resources. To that end, the Coyote UGV is sure to deliver.

Look for more to come soon at this site about the Coyote project. We are most thankful for the continued support of our sponsors and team members. We are pleased to be part of such a historic and important undertaking. If there is to be a next time, we surley hope to be there!

Rob Meyer

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Last Update 27 Dec 2005