Autonomous driving is looked upon as solution for future of automotive vehicles. The technology has tremendous possibilities to improve safety, fuel economy, comfort, cost of ownership etc.
The project to develop an autonomous controller from scratch was undertaken, with objective to drive under selected test scenarios. The car, modified to drive using this autonomous controller, is able to handle these scenarios. The key scenarios include ability to successfully drive on tracks with well-marked lanes, Follow the route as per selected trip plan file, recognize and follow all traffic road signs, traffic signals en-route, identify other vehicles on the road or pedestrians in the lane and take the appropriate action.
The development was carried out using frugal engineering approach. As the Autonomous Vehicle 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, vehicle calibration, vehicle deployment and field testing. This paper gives the insight of this development process, problems/issues encountered and solutions of the same.