1 Intelligent Ground Vehicle : Pablobot

The annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) allows for students on the undergraduate and graduate level to design, build, and test intelligent ground vehicles in a competitive environment. The IGVC is a three part competition consisting of a vehicle design, autonomous navigation through an unknown obstacle course and an interoperability challenge that requires the utilization of the JAUS communication protocol. In the past, the Citadel has competed in the prestigious competition with varying degrees of success. The 2016 entrant in the IGVC competition from the Citadel’s Electrical Engineering department will be Team Pablo and their PabloBot. PabloBot is the result of significant design changes in both mechanical and software systems. Through the services of the Mechanical engineering department, the chassis was rebuilt completely, comprising of a two wheeled, DC powered, forklift style differential drive vehicle. The software system moved from the Windows based Labview platform to the Linux based Robot Operating System (ROS) and the image processing library OpenCV. Through integrated sensory hardware, the vehicle navigates through an unknown obstacle course utilizing path finding algorithms and obstacle mapping to achieve a specified goal.