We are the Brentwood High School Autonomous Vehicles team, a group of four seniors that explore the field of autonomous vehicles.

Our project originally began in August 2018, and over the past year and a half we worked to decode the realm of autonomous vehicles, from understanding the algorithms that power them, to their control schemes. We hope to use our conceptual understanding to create a custom implementation of an autonomous vehicle in a scale car.

The Car

Our car is built using the MIT RACECAR platform with some modifications.

Built on a 1/10th scale Traxxas RC Car, our autonomous vehicle uses various sensors, ranging from a LIDAR, a ZED Camera, and an IMU to obtain environmental information. This information is then locally processed on the embedded Jetson TX1, a development kit built around the NVIDIA Maxwell Architecture, which is optimized for visual and data processing. With the environmental information we control the car using a custom Arduino implementation for steering and a VESC for speed control.

With a custom power management system using a laptop battery, the car is powered and is a self functioning unit.

First Year

Our first year was mainly exploratory. We dove into the field and learned various different concepts that are integral to autonomous vehicles. These concepts varied from what type of hardware we needed, to our sensor setup, and the basics of algorithmic control.

Our First Year Goals:

  • Alter the Traxxas Car
  • Build the car chassis
  • Mount all the Hardware
  • Make a power delivery system
  • Flash the Jetson
  • Integrate all the hardware with the Jetson

Second Year

During our second year we’re looking to build on the foundation that we had before. In involves rewriting a lot of the code we previously had. With much of our previous code being prototypes, we are working to make this year more structured and final so that we can move towards a finalized project.

Our Second Year Goals:

  • Finalize the car chassis and organize cable management
  • Implement the VESC
  • Rewrite the control scheme for more high level control
  • Work on SLAM and detection algorithms, rewriting them to work with new control scheme
  • Set up networking on the Jetson to allow SSH and X11 Forwarding
  • Write a mapping algorithm that can self map an area
  • Create a navigation system that is able to navigate from point A to B in the pre-scanned map

Note: This post was compiled using previous internal documentation.