A Prototype of an Intelligent Ground Vehicle for constrained environment: Design and Development

Autonomous vehicles are bound to take over the urban road scenario in the near future. While fully autonomous driving is yet to be deployed on urban roads unconditionally, constrained environments provide an opportunity for preliminary testing and validation as the technology emerges. Autonomous robots can be tuned to be robust in constrained environments. The technologies developed can then be extended and transferred to unconstrained environments with required safety precautions. This paper describes the design, development and testing of EKLAVYA 7.0, an autonomous differential drive robot that can follow lanes while avoiding stationary obstacles as well as navigate through a series of land markings specified by GPS coordinates. It was developed to participate in the 27th Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC 2019). The paper describes the overall mechanical, embedded and software architecture developed for this constrained environment along with system integration, testing and results.