My Projects
Undergraduate Thesis: Autonomous Surface Vehicle.
This project involved many different skills to make improvements to the vehicle on different fronts.
Actuator auto-calibration routine. The rudder was controlled by a linear actuator on a linkage. The actuator's feedback was an analog voltage input. However, since the readings would vary based on battery voltage, the midpoint would shift. To remedy this, an auto-calibration routine was added at startup to reach the ends of travel.
The actuator on the vehicle had a slow update rate. Combining this with a bang-bang controller that had no deadzone cause the actuator to have large oscilations. To eliminate overshoot and reduce steady-state error, a deadzone and PWM inputs were implemented in the software to improve the actuator's response.
See a video of the actuator updates here.
The GPS inputs were also being read without a filter. Due to time constraints, I was unable to learn about and implement a Kalman filter on this project. Instead, a low-pass filter was applied to reduce the impact noise had on vehicle response. This improvement was enough to get the vehcle following a simple waypoint trajectory.