Navigation of an intelligent vehicle by using stand-alone GPS, compass and laser range finder

Intelligent vehicle is the vehicle which has ability to drive itself autonomously and purposefully. The vehicle is expected to facilitate the people who cannot drive. Some modules of the vehicle; steering control, for instances, can assist the driver to make the driver drive more comfortable and safely. This paper proposes an autonomous navigation and control algorithm which is capable to travel around the unmodified racing field with randomly placed obstacles by using GPS, digital compass and laser range finder. In this research, an electrically powered golf car is modified for autonomous navigation and control. Autonomous navigation system incorporates with two tasks ldquotrackingrdquo and ldquoobstacles avoidancerdquo. The use of behavior based navigation approach to extract the behaviors into two major individual behaviors which are ldquoseek goalrdquo behavior and ldquoavoid obstaclerdquo behavior. Potential field based method, broadly used in robot motion planning, is applied for the seek goal and avoid obstacle behaviors. The vehicle generates a collision free-path by superimpose of the two vectors resulting from seek goal and avoid obstacle behaviors. Experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully navigate the intelligent vehicle on predefined way points at various speed while avoiding randomly placed obstacles.