Technology for Designing the Steering Subsystem Component of an Autonomous Vehicle

Autonomous vehicles offer means to complete unsafe military operations without endangering the lives of soldiers. Such solutions have fueled many efforts towards designing autonomous, or unmanned, systems. Military and academic research efforts alike continue to focus on developing these systems. While many different autonomous vehicles have been introduced, however, such complex systems have limited drive-by-wire operability. The complete process to up-fit a vehicle to fully autonomous operation involves the design, up-fit, testing and verification of many different subsystems. The objective of this thesis is to design and model an autonomous steering system requiring little modifications to an existing steering system. It is desirable to still operate the vehicle manually as well as preserve the vehicle's visual appearance. Up-fit and implementation of the designed steering system and verification of its functionality has been documented as well. Utilization of the supplied controller and software has enabled the testing and characterization of the system. The proposed design offers a solution to a wide variety of wheeled vehicles steered via the traditional and common steering wheel method. In addition, modifications have been made to an existing simulation of an unmanned vehicle in a military testbed environment (Fort Benning). The simulation accounts for the control methodology as it has been designed and tested with, which offers the ability to analyze the dynamics of the unmanned system. Figure 1 (a) Components of the REDCAR Program, (b) Components of the IFP Scenario developed by ROCC at SSC San Diego, (c) ROBOCUP team competition, (d) Mathematical abstraction of robotic soccer / steal the flag in academic research [16]. Autonomous vehicles offer an alternative solution to accomplish unknown and potentially extremely dangerous missions in the military without putting lives at risk. Additionally, the diverse missions that autonomous vehicles can perform enable them to complete tasks that may otherwise be impossible for a person. These tasks include reconnaissance or transportation of goods, for example. Research in academia, government and private laboratories is booming in the field of autonomous systems. The pool of research literature treating unmanned systems is voluminous. It is certainly far too vast a body of literature to summarize in detail in this Masters Thesis. In fact, survey articles now give good overviews of the progress in many of the sub-fields comprising the research area known as " unmanned systems. " Progress in the development of unmanned ground vehicles can be found in [1] and [2] and [3]. …