Development of a Low Cost Autonomous Ground Vehicle
Nitik Jain, Aalap Anil Shah, Hemanth Bollamreddi, Mangal Kothari · 2022
Autonomous vehicles have been actively used for a range of tasks such as automated driving, logistics delivery, surveillance etc. Such systems are typically designed for specialized use cases, and hence perform subpar outside of that environment. Consequently, the development of a generic multipurpose autonomous mobile robots capable of navigating in varied environments has gained popularity. In this paper, we present a autonomous navigation stack for mobile ground robots using low-cost sensors. Our proposed autonomous navigation stack is modular and capable of exploiting structure in the environment like driving lanes, yet functions well even in the absence of such features. We believe a modular approach allows the stack to be more flexible, robust, and adaptable to various environments and not constrained by the availability of sensor data. We also describe the development of our vehicle Daksh-II and demonstrate the autonomous capabilities of our stack in outdoor and indoor environments. Finally, we present the cost analysis for replication of our stack on other vehicles.