Development of Autonomous Vehicle Controller 2019-26-0098

Autonomous driving is looked upon as a solution for future automotive vehicles. The technology has tremendous possibilities to improve safety, fuel economy, comfort, cost of ownership etc. A project to develop an autonomous controller from scratch was undertaken to drive under selected test scenarios. The car, modified to drive using this autonomous controller, is able to successfully drive on tracks with well-marked lanes. The car follows the route as per selected trip plan file, recognizes and follows all traffic road signs, traffic signals en-route. The car is able to identify other vehicles on the road or pedestrians in the lane and takes the appropriate action. The development was carried out using frugal engineering approach. As this technology is still under development, the standard proven published approaches are not available. The major development tasks include sensor selection and characterization, sensor data processing, software architecture finalization, software development, hardware finalization, software verification and validation, setting up of the simulation setup and field testing. This paper gives the insight of this development process, problems / issues encountered and solutions of the same.