Enabling an electro-mechanical gear-selection interface for an unmanned ground vehicle

• Main Author: Tai, Kok Wei
• Other Authors: Seet Gim Lee, Gerald
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Mechatronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16178
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

An autonomous vehicle is a self-pilot vehicle that does not require an operator to navigate and accomplish its task [3]. It is implemented to replace human on precision formation flying, investigating hazards environment, checking piping condition in the deep sea, exploring the surface of other planets in space exploration and even become a combat vehicle during the warfare. Thus the primitive idea is to develop an autonomous grounded vehicle to replace human in carry out operations on exploration and navigation, search and rescue, and transportation in this project. Due to the time constraint, this report emphasizes only on the electromechanical gear-selection interface which consists of high precision mechanisms, actuators, sensors, high-frequency PWM amplifiers with ICs, and digital signal processors (DPS) while the user interface is used to maintain the communications between the user and the vehicle, and receive the feedback from the position sensors. The mechanical design and control circuit of this electromechanical gear-selection interface had been developed in an earlier stage; therefore there are two tasks need to be carried out in this project: analysis and improvements on mechanical design, and implementation of the control software on this interface. For the electromechanical system of the interface, the limitations are listed, analyzed and improved subsequently. On the other hand, the control software architecture is implemented by the BASIC language through the BASIC Stamp software compiler. Beside these, three experiments have been conducted to determine the torque current characteristic of the motor, the position encoder value and the input value to the servo controller chip. In conclusion, the results show that the development and implementation of enabling an electromechanical gear-selection on an unmanned vehicle is achieved successfully while the future works that can be continued along the track are also described briefly at the end of this report.