“Autonomous vehicles using BeagleBone AI-64 can follow lanes, stop at red boxes and detect stop signs.
We made this little autonomous vehicle using BeagleBone AI-64 for our ELEC 553 final project at Rice university to learn how we could use embedded systems and gain hands-on experience in real practical applications.
The car is able to detect the lanes and execute the lane-keeping algorithms. As a result, the car could run maintaining between two lanes. When the car detects a red or stops sign during lane keeping, the car would stop and run the image recognition. After that, the car would back to run and stop at the final red box.
For speed control, the car uses an encoder that is installed on the shaft that turns when the wheels turn. We have implemented a Linux driver that uses interrupts to read the encoder, and we calculate the speed in Python using two readings from the encoder. That allows us to set a target speed and implement a software controller to achieve the target speed.”