Arquitetura de hardware e software para supervisão e controle de um carro autônomo

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are vehicles able to perform tasks or missions, on land, in the air or water, with no human intervention. These vehicles have numerous applications such as outer space exploration, geographic mapping or even passenger and freight transportation. Researches with autonomous vehicles have been in focus for the last years, mainly due to the technological advances in this area. However, because of the variety of systems, each one brings a very particular solution of hardware and software, making the application in different systems most of times impracticable. With this background, this dissertation covers the project, the development and the validation of a hierarchical architecture of hardware and software for control and supervision of an autonomous car with generic characteristics aiming the application in various terrestrial autonomous vehicles. The proposed architecture has three levels named Control Level, Processing Level and User Level. This proposal was developed based on the study of architectures from several studies available in the literature. The solution targets a compromise between fulfilling all the demands of an autonomous car and offering an easy access model for the transmission of commands and reception of information by an end user. The chosen solution was implemented in the autonomous car of the UFMG. The validation was performed with tests in the three levels by using a speed control, a vehicle localization system and remote transmission of commands to the vehicle. The results testify the robustness, stability and feasibility of the proposed solution, concluding that it complies satisfactorily with the demanded requirements for implementation in an autonomous car, providing yet a user friendly interface.