Hardware Setup

When people think on the cars of the future, the first sight is a driverless vehicle moving around crowded traffic ways. Image popularized by science fiction during last year’s.

Although fully autonomous cars are the apparent long term goal, this is not the unique pathway to pursuit, since many drivers will remain attached to the will, and pleasure of driving sensations. On the other hand, what drivers will not dismiss is the need for security and assistance especially in more demanding traffic environments.

ATLASCAR1 has been developed to allow data acquisition and thus deploy different types of research, enriched with different kinds of sensors with distinct perception capabilities.

ATLASCAR1 developing has been a challenge at many engineering levels such as computational architecture or sensors frame sets and distribution or power autonomy.
The chosen platform was a standard gasoline-powered wagon with 75Hp and a 460L trunk, reenginered maintaining the car legal conformity and human driving capability.

The hardware setup can be classified in three levels:

• Power generation and management
• Onboard Sensors
• Processing framework

To ensure power supply on most circumstances was added a power generation circuit capable of guarantee the equipment energy consumption. Energy autonomy achieved by the redesign of the engine alternator circuit, by including of a DC generator propelled by the engine shaft.

The DC generator is connected to an AC inverter that generates 220/230 ending in a ups to ensure a stable power supply.

The actual set of sensors composed by:

• 3D laser, custom developed;
• stereo camera;
• 2 point grey camera with a pan-tilt unit;
• thermal camera;
• three 2D lasers;
• Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU);
• gps;

Researching team can monitor the entire system throw the LCD display placed inside vehicle. For that was placed two LCD in the backside of the car directly connected with computer A and B. The front LCD shows alternately the information from computer A or B.