Unmanned Systems Technology 013 | AutonomouStuff Lincoln MKZ | AI systems | Unmanned Underwater Vehicles | Cosworth AG2 UAV twin | AceCore Neo | Maintenance | IDEX 2017 Show report

21 to control the steering, braking and throttle via the CAN network. Without the drive-by-wire interface, the CAN control messages are not readily available to anyone who buys the vehicle. Laser sensors The MKZ has two types of laser sensor around the vehicle. Hambrick says, “Lidar is one sensor modality for perception, and we use a variety for research. We use the Velodyne 64-layer Lidar sensor to get a 360 º field of view [FOV] for mapping, and we have developed some Lidar localisation algorithms so we can localise ourselves to know where the car is within its environment. “The 64-layer sensor gives more than 2.2 million points of data per second, and we collect that from the roof. There are trade-offs though – it’s a big spinning system, so for a production version you would not use that.” The Velodyne HDL-64E sensor has an effective range of 120 m around the vehicle. The returning data, known as the point cloud, is fed back as time-stamped packets via an Ethernet link. This data includes distance, angle and intensity values of the reflection of the laser, and is integrated with data from the IMU and GPS satellite navigation system. Structures in the point cloud such as stop signs and intersections are identified and tagged with the location to produce a base map. AS also uses the smaller, 16-layer HDL- 16E sensor for obstacle detection and tracking. The company has built its own Lidar processing system for recognising objects such as pedestrians and tracking their distance from the car, their direction of travel and speed, and this is handled in the compute engine. These 16-layer rotating laser sensors are placed on the two front corners. “This is very similar to where Ford puts them, but our system is flexible and this is not yet locked down owing to continuous r&d,” says Hambrick. The sensors could also be placed on the roof or the front bumper; all that would need to change is an offset value in the middleware. AutonomouStuff Lincoln MKZ | Dossier Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2017 The Velodyne 64-layer Lidar sensor gives more than 2.2 million points of data per second, and we collect that from the roof The MKZ’s front bumper is fitted with two 16-layer laser scanners