At StreetDrone, we are delighted when the next generation of self-driving engineers use our vehicles as part of the culmination of their degree.
Our congratulations here go to Pawan Pawar of HAN University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands) who developed both a motion planner and trajectory tracking controller, before demonstrating these in both simulation and in the real world using a StreetDrone Twizy vehicle owned by the university for his Master’s thesis. This vehicle is regularly used by students and at StreetDrone we’re excited to see it complete the validation loop for autonomous vehicles research and development.
Pawan developed path planning capability that could avoid obstacles in common urban scenarios, including both static and dynamic objects, primarily using LiDAR sensors. A selection of different path planning strategies were examined as part of the project, before Pawan focused on methods around a lattice-based motion planner, improving it with measures such as cost functions.
Further examples of such path planners (e.g. A* planner) and similar resources can be found at the Project Aslan open source GitHub: https://github.com/project-aslan/Aslan
Pawan commented “working on this project was a great opportunity to learn about autonomous vehicles in depth. Creating a software interface using ROS, to bridge the gap between all different software, for real-time application was the most important and challenging task, yet it was fun to work on. Since the results were promising, I hope that this project will be useful for further development in this field at larger scale. I am thankful for StreetDrone’s vehicle interface which made testing easy. The exposure from this project has made me confident to work in field of autonomous driving.”
Jan Benders, Program Manager Control Systems at HAN University of Applied Sciences and advisory board member of Project Aslan commented “We are happy to be able to work with an open platform like the StreetDrone. This enables us to provide an efficient applied research environment to students enabling them to bring theory into practice”
Well done Pawan, and we look forward to seeing your next work in the autonomous vehicle field!
For more information on the StreetDrone Twizy, or how StreetDrone can help get hands-on autonomous tech into your organisation, please get in touch or email info@streetdrone.com
For more information on HAN university, please visit the university site. You can also read the original news piece here (Dutch)
