Autonomous Vehicle Function Experiments with Low-Cost Environment Sensors

The paper presents the development of an experimental vehicle framework for testing autonomous vehicle functions. The development of system serves primarily the education and the scientific work of the students. It is a good experience for the students on any level of mechatronic education because of its diverse possibilities for mechanical engineering, embedded systems, or control design. Overall system architecture, sensors, actuators and control solutions are outlined in this paper along with the development of a low-cost 3-D LIDAR sensor and some Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) experiments.