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7 Platform one While there are many weeding robot projects, handling complex farming terrain that includes uneven ground and puddles remains a challenge for UGVs. It’s one that spurred a team of inventors from the Hefei Institute of Material Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to come with an innovative solution (writes Peter Donaldson). They have designed a small UGV whose tracks have a large contact area in relation to the vehicle’s weight to minimise pressure on the ground and consequent damage to crops. A vision system, consisting of four cameras and a set of lights, feeds into plant recognition software designed to distinguish crops from weeds to control a pair of weeding claws mounted side by side on a carriage beam. The claws can move laterally on the beam, while the beam can move fore and aft and vertically in relation to the vehicle’s chassis to compensate for uneven ground. The claws transfer the weeds to a pulveriser that includes a pair of bladed wheels in a tank, which is mounted at the rear and low between the tracks. The pulverised weeds can be turned into fertiliser, according to the inventors. The drive system is at the front and includes an electric motor that turns the two front wheels inside the tracks via driveshafts. Ground vehicles A new friend for farmers National Instruments (NI) has developed hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technology that can simulate actual road conditions for electric vehicle testing (writes Nick Flaherty). This eliminates environmental factors and cuts the time to test car prototypes by 90%. With HIL, there is far less need to test finished cars on courses or public roads to check their performance and safety responses. The complexity of electric and driverless systems with interdependent subsystems can make conducting reproducible tests on roads difficult. Car maker Subaru has replaced the roads in the validation tests with an NI HIL simulation solution built on test cards using the PXI standard and NI’s LabView software. This allows Subaru to eliminate the environmental factors and thoroughly test a vehicle’s embedded controller in a virtual environment before running real- world diagnostics on the complete system. “We were able to implement a customised HIL system in just one or two weeks and develop our software in-house,” said Daisuke Umiguchi at Subaru. “That helped keep our software development costs to around one-sixth of the cost of commissioning an outside developer.” Subaru used a controller-driven dynamometer, or rolling road, from Horiba, and vehicle dynamics simulation software from Virtual Mechanics. Together, these simulated the physical load conditions found on actual roads. This driving system transmitted the calculated values to the HIL system in real time to create a closed-loop control loop between the models on the HIL system and the driving system. This allowed the HIL system to apply a range of loads to the vehicle throughout the tests. Subaru plans to use the system at the final stages of development for electric vehicles as a quality check, and eventually expand its use to all car types. Testing moves off roads Driverless cars Subaru no longer needs public roads to test its electric cars’ performance Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2018