Work on a miniature autonomous vehicle
Project context
The CRIStAL research laboratory is an institute dedicated to research in electronics, computer science and automation. It is a member of the CNRS (French largest research organization) and a partner of the Inria (national institute for research in digital science and technology).
I integrated the SyCoMoRES team who is focused on real-time systems. As it is an international team, we used to often communicate in English.
An important research topic at the CRIStAL laboratory is autonomous vehicles. Therefore, my mission was to make a previously developed miniature autonomous vehicle work and write a comprehensive documentation.
Project details
As the people who created the vehicle were not working at the laboratory anymore, I had to start by understanding and retro-engineer how the vehicle worked by myself.
I was able to write a complete documentation, in English on GitLab, detailing everything from the build process to the autonomous mode testing. The goal was to make the project open source. I even suggested software improvements, such as using ROS2 instead of ROS (Robot Operating System) to avoid using deprecated software. But as I needed to focus on the project stability, I did not have the occasion to do the upgrades myself.
I ended my internship by presenting a video demonstration of the vehicle navigating autonomously in an environment that was not predefined. The research team was satisfied of my work as they got exactly what they expected from me.
Project gallery
Visualization of a 2D room scan with a lidar using RViz
Visualization of a 2D room scan with a lidar using RViz and safety distances added
3D printing of the ultrasonic sensor mount for the autonomous vehicle
Result of the 3D-printed ultrasonic sensor mount for the autonomous vehicle