Summary

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​The project demonstrates the a unmanned intelligent ground vehicle development using a wild thumper platform and design of its guidance, navigation and control. The rover was integrated with different sensors such as wheel rotary encoders, IMU, GPS, Pixhawk, Rp-LiDAR, and a web-camera. The computing unit of the rover was Intel NUC and all the motor command were conducted through Teensy 4.0. Several experiments were conducted on the rover. First, the rover was programmed to follow the GPS waypoints using Rover's ardupilot Pixhawk and Mission Planner. Secondly, the rover was guided to follow the waypoints in a GPS denied environment with the localization information from other sensors and using EKF and PID to guide the rover from one waypoint to the other. Rover was also tasked to motion planning with the obstacle avoidance conducted by the fusion of LiDAR and camera. The communication between the rover and the station (PC) was conducted within the ROS framework.