Quanser Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio
A comprehensive teaching and research station with autonomous and collaborative robots. It consists of flying and mobile robots, a control and monitoring station, a motion capture system and safety equipment (nets, floor mats, etc.)
Sample research topics:
- Control of a single flying and driving robot (manual and automatic mode),
- Vision of the location
- Communication between robots
- Cooperation between robots
- Mapping
- Navigation
- Multi-agent systems(swarm)
- And others
Base station:
- PC with Windows 10 Professional operating system, 6-core Intel processor, 32 GB RAM, hard drives: 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD
- High performance GPU
- USB keyboard, USB optical mouse
- 3 monitors 24”
- QUARC- add-on to Matlab / Simulink. Note - Matlab / Simulink licenses not included in the package
- USB controller
- Wi-Fi router with built-in processor and 802.11ac standard support with a speed of 1,900Mbps
Flying Robot:
- 4-rotor configuration (quadrotor), permissible load 300g, power supply: Li-Po 11V batteries with a capacity allowing for min. 10minutes of flight under max. load,
- Built-in programmable control platform Intel Aero Compute board, 64-bit 4-core processor, 4GB of RAM DDR3-1600, 8x PWM, 2x UART, 3x SPI, 4x ADC, 3x encoder input, 5x GPIO
- Main camera for orientation in the area: stereoscopic 3D Intel RealSense R200 (RGB camera, 2 IR vision sensors), depth of field of view 3m, resolution 1080p HD @ 30fps, VGA @ 60fps), additional camera for ground observation: VGA resolution @ 120fps
Ground Robot:
- Programmable control platform with 2 driven wheels - Kobuki Mobile Base platform, diameter: 35 cm, height: 27 cm, permissible load 4.5 kg, power supply: Li-Po batteries with a capacity allowing for 2 hours of work under max. load, max. linear speed 0.7 m/s
- Built-in control platform: programmable with open architecture: Raspberry Pi 3B + (4-core Cortex-A53 1.4GHz processor) with integrated Wi-Fi communication module b / g / n / ac
- Microsoft Kinect RGBD motion sensor
- Other sensors: tactile crash (3x), distance (range from 0.5 to 4m), wheel drop (on 2 wheels), ground fault (on the housing), 3-axis gyroscope, wheel rotation angle encoders, color programmable LEDs (2x), IR proximity sensors for orientation in the environment
- Expansion inputs/outputs: 24 configurable I/O channels, ADC converters (2x), PWM (4x), encoder inputs (2x), UART, SPI, I2C, USB ports (2x), 1GB Ethernet, MIPI CSI camera port, port MIPI DSI for connecting a touch panel
- Environment orientation camera: VGA @ 30fps resolution
Additional equipment:
- Motion capture system in the working space: Natural Point OptiTrack Flex 13, number of cameras depends of the size of the laboratory
- vertical networks securing the working space with mounting brackets
- Foam floor mat protecting the working area
- Battery chargers for drones and wheeled robots (1 charger per vehicle)