Section: Software

Development work: Cycab

Participants : Fabien Spindler, Andrea Cherubini.

The Cycab is a four wheel drive autonomous electric car dedicated to vision-based mobile robotic applications (see Fig. 2 .b). A pan-tilt head (Biclops PTM) equipped with a firewire Marlin camera with about 70 degrees field of view is mounted on the front bumper. The Cycab is equipped with two computers connected through an internal network: a PC dedicated to the low level control of the actuators, and a laptop connected to the camera and dedicated to high level visual servoing applications.

At the end of this year, a new and more generic low level controller coming from Inria Grenoble - Rhônes-Alpes was tested with success. New software developments are in progress in order to interface our framework with this new controller.

Our vision-based navigation scheme in outdoor urban environments is under modification to improve the path following precision (see Section  8.2.4 ), as well as the accuracy in navigation from a visual memory [28] .