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

26 Dossier | AutonomouStuff Lincoln MKZ object tracking of the Mobileye camera.” According to Joe Buckner, director of engineering at AutonomouStuff, “We are talking over CAN to the radar. The sensors have an Ethernet interface but we are finding that CAN is more than sufficient.” There are ultrasound sensors on the vehicle, but these are not part of the system. Hambrick says, “We are not focusing on parking, but if you want to do a parking algorithm you would combine ultrasound with laser scanners.” Navigation AS has worked with Novatel to develop kits that combine GPS navigation with an IMU to provide data when GPS is not available. The kit uses a 1750 fibre optic gyroscope from KVH, whose output is tightly coupled to the GPS system. The GPS is accurate down to 2 cm when used with an RTK base station, where a 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz radio is used to send correction data. Using radio telemetry restricts where the vehicle can be used, so there are other methods of localisation being used in parallel, says Hambrick. Another option is to use Novatel correction data from the Terrastar satellite, which provides accuracy to an average of 10 cm. A differential GPS antenna is mounted on the roof. Compute engine The heart of the autonomous car is the compute engine. AS has worked with Neousys Technology to specify its own engine for the MKZ, which is called the Nebula. This combines a 4 GHz Intel Skylake Core i7-6700 quad-core processor with 16 Gbytes of DDR4 memory and the six Gigabit Ethernet connections that are needed for the sensors into a 240 x 225 x 110 mm footprint. However, the key to the system is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card, which provides 768 graphics processing units (GPUs). This is one option, according to Hambrick. “We work with many other compute platforms depending on the specific project. If we were to plan to use a number of cameras and radars to implement deep learning algorithms then we would use a different platform that may include an Nvidia DrivePX,” he says. An innovative thermal design helps to dissipate the heat generated by the GPU card so that the compute engine can operate reliably at 60 C with 100% GPU loading. The Nebula has 16 channels of isolated digital I/O, but that is not being used. “We don’t really have a use for the digital I/O at this point,” says Buckner. The main storage is a 128 Gbyte solid- state disk with a thermal sensor, and the box accommodates two 2.5 in SATA hard disk drives with RAID 0/1 support for basic data storage. April/May 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology Point Grey cameras monitor objects around the vehicle