Development of a Prototype Autonomous Electric Vehicle

Abstract

The paper presents an Autonomous Electric Vehicle with obstacle avoidance system. This research work made use of ultrasonic sensors, the principle of distance measurements and calculations as well as detecting obstacle on its path. The device consists of three ultrasonic sensors that detect object for each left, right and front of the vehicle, based on developed and installed codes in the Arduino microcontroller and displays the range using ISIS Proteus 8 electronic modelling software. The minimum and maximum range of object detections is 2cm to 400cm respectively. However, the measured distance was from 25cm to 150cm and the corresponding calculated distances using oscilloscope waveforms are 28.10cm and 148.3cm. The difference between the measured and calculated distance was 5.4% on average. GPS navigates the vehicle autonomously to its destination using an algorithm for navigation based on reactive behavior. The vehicle is powered by rechargeable batteries (4 lithium ion batteries) which are charged using external power source by connecting into electricity grid. Furthermore, a solar panel has been utilized as a secondary source of power to charge the batteries. This reduces the dependency of the vehicle on external power sources. The vehicle is capable of moving for about 20m to and fro and avoiding obstacle on its path.