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

30 Dossier | AutonomouStuff Lincoln MKZ Future developments Development of the AS platform can go in a number of different directions. The most immediate is to have the MKZ as a Level 4 autonomous system, driving on its own through an urban environment, onto a highway and off again. “By the end of the year I want to be able to take a predetermined path through a town and drive autonomously through that route, while recognising and obeying road signs, then entering a highway and exiting it to show quasi-L4 autonomy,” says Buckner. “We have all the different pieces and we are pulling them all together to do that in a clean boot. “That means we learn that much more about how our customers are using what we have, and identify pieces of the software that we can commercialise, as it’s a problem that everyone will need to solve. If we can allow customers to focus on what they do best, they will get there a lot faster and insert their technology into the modular software.” The modular nature of the design also applies to the hardware. AS is developing its own, purely electric vehicle platform based on the Gem, a small electric ‘cart’ manufactured by Polaris in the US. It has a top speed of 25 mph and can be configured with two, four or six seats. The Ranger, mentioned earlier, is an off-road version of the Gem. AS has developed its own ‘universal- by-wire’ electronic interface for the Gem and the Ranger but it can also be used for all kinds of vehicles – the next target is trucks. The aim is that customers can use the software for production systems. That will require some changes. “We are building the software for research but want a path to production, and ROS 2.0 provides that,” says Hambrick. That would remove tools such as the visualisation that combines the camera data with the laser point cloud, as this is not needed in a production system. The Ubuntu Linux would also be replaced by an automotive Linux being developed by the Yocto group, or other real-time operating systems with ROS running on top. “There are also security concerns in running a production system in ROS that are still being defined,” he said. “There is an abstraction interface, and you could rip out the ROS interface and replace it with something else,” Hambrick says. “You have the core software functionality and you could build your own proprietary message system to make it as difficult as possible for someone to reverse engineer.” Building a modular system where all the hardware and software works together reliably is a considerable challenge. It requires a middleware architecture that supports a modular and careful implementation of the sensors. All this allows researchers and developers to focus on their specific projects without having to build the underlying technology themselves. April/May 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology Bobby Hambrick formed AutonomouStuff (AS) shortly after the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2014, when he noticed a large gap in the industry’s supply chain serving the growing interest in automated vehicles in various markets, including automotive, mining, military, agriculture, aerospace and academia. He realised that robotics companies were finding it hard to gain access to the technology needed to solve their applications, so he set up AS to bring together the hardware and software components that engineers need. “I call this bringing together the world’s best,” says Hambrick. The company has been part of the unmanned vehicle industry from its early days, bringing early systems to the autonomous track days that ran in 2016 in the US and the UK, as well as working with leading development teams around the world. The Illinois-based company now provides sensors, engineering services and automated driving software to more than 2000 of the world’s most advanced automated driving teams and research projects. The company The modular software is designed to operate across a range of vehicle platforms, from the MKZ and Ford Fusion to the Polaris Gem and Ranger