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An Environment Friendly Autonomous ATV - Practical Mechatronic Project

Conference Paper · June 2007

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Raivo Sell Mart Tamre

Tallinn University of Technology Tallinn University of Technology
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An Environment Friendly Autonomous ATV -

Practical Mechatronic Project
R. Sell, M. Tamre

Department of Mechatronics, Tallinn University of Technology, Ehitajate tee 5, 19086 Tallinn,

Estonia; Phone: +3726203201, Fax: +3726203203, e-mail: raivo@staff.ttu.ee

Department of Mechatronics, Tallinn University of Technology, Ehitajate tee 5, 19086 Tallinn,

Estonia; Phone: +3726203202, Fax: +3726203203, e-mail: mart@staff.ttu.ee

Abstract — The project deals with a practical mechatronics

project involving final year bachelor students. The aim of this
project is to refine the student’s teamwork, project management
skills together with true mechatronics application. The
application is ATV based mid-size autonomous mobile robot with
the special functionality. An important focus of the project is also
the environment friendly energy solutions.

Index Term - mobile robot, mechatronics project, project based

learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
The mobile robotics market demand is drastically increased
during last years. Robotic markets are set to grow quickly and
become large economic sectors in their own right as well as
providing the means for both manufacturing and service
industries to become more effective [1]. Sales for domestic
robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn mowing, window cleaning and
other types) is expected to reach over million units, while sales
for toy and entertainment robots will exceed more than million
units [2]. On the frame of these trends the mechatronics project
of mobile robotics was established on the 2006 at department
of Mechatronics in Tallinn University of Technology. The idea
was to develop practical mid-size robotic application for the
use of agriculture or urban areas. The application development
is a mechatronics project for third year bachelors before the
final work. Project lasts 2 month. It was started at last year
when we acquired the base platform from standard mid-size
ATV (All Terrain Vehicle) and removed the compulsion
engine and drive mechanism. The result of 2006 teamwork
was completely developed electrical drive and turning system,
computer control software and sensor system. This year 2
month project continued the work and rebuild almost all
system with added functionality. Although the result of last
year teamwork worked quite well, the students of this year
decided to rebuild the mechanics due the weak engines and
transmission mechanisms. In control side the selected data
exchange protocol wasn’t good enough to transfer the
increased amount of data. The figure 1 shows the outlook of
2006 and 2007 results.
Figure 1 Outlook of result in 2006 & 2007
The mechatronics project course was divided into four groups:
• Mechanics
• Energy
• Control
• Functionality
Every group has approximately 8 persons, project leader and
integration manager. Groups had following tasks:
Mechanics team
The mechanics team had to develop and reengineer the main
drive mechanism and turn mechanism. Both had to be powered
by the electrical engines. In addition they had to develop the
main controllers for engines. The challenge was also to rebuild
the last year design and develop completely new design
solution. Big freedom for this task was given and the team was
enabled to develop as novel design as they can.
Energy team
The energy team was responsible for all cabling and main
relay box. They had to develop professional cabling solution
with switches, fuses and emergency stop system. Another main
task was to develop an environment friendly power system and
study different possibilities for that.
Control team:
The control team was responsible for control system, which
when ready, should allow controlling the robot using PC, RC
remote and joystick. They also had to develop interface and
choose appropriate communications protocol. The remote
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control has to perform on the basis of radio control using a
modem.
Functionality team
The functional team was given a responsibility to handle all
problems relating to functionality. That meant following tasks:
1. Driving by coordinates received from GPS
2. Avoiding obstacles using sensors
3. Radar or a laser sensor to effectively avoid and
identify obstacles in front.
4. Handling signals received from sensors
II. PROJECT SOLUTION
The goal of this project was to build a mobile robot which
would have the following functional capabilities:
• An autonomous regime
means that it could travel from one point to another
by using GPS, whereas it should manage avoiding
obstacles by using sonars and laser scanner;
• RC/PDA control,
where the ATV is controlled by using the radio
controlled (RC) remote and PDA as a sensor
feedback. This is a short-range operation option;
• PC control,
where the computer (laptop) control interface with
external joystick is used. The communication is over
the WLAN, WIMAX or radio modem, enabling full
functionality in long-range control. The control
solution has a special Graphical User Interface (GUI)
with debugging options;
• Video feedback.
Target
Functionality team experienced several difficulties during the
development. Getting the GPS to function properly was not a
hard task. The device sent out a string, which included also the
coordinates, so the only problem was to cut out the necessary
part. However the main trouble was to get the ultra sonic
sensors work properly. The data they gave was inconsistent
and the sensors themselves crashed frequently. Finally they
achieved non-crashing SRF08 sonar. The achievement was
even more exceptional because both of our programmers did it
almost simultaneously, though separately. On the end the team
were faced with numerous small details. This work includes:
summaries of weekly reports, working principles of sonar and
digital compass, program codes (written in C++) and an
explanation of how the autonomous algorithm works.
Analogous problems and working rytms was also with other
teams.
The user interface of robot was developed by the control team.
They had to develop 2 independent control methods. The PC
control had to have user interface with the control buttons and
sensor feedback. In addition the interface has the GPS
coordinate insert form. The figure 3 shows two tabs of
developed interface.

Desired direction

2.3
3
2
1

Actual direction

Start

Figure 2 The GPS navigation

On the figure 2 the GPS navigation idea is illustrated. Every

GPS cycle (around 1 sec) the distance between robot and Figure 3 Graphical User Interface for PC
target is calculated. If the value is below the set value (in
testing 5 m) then the robot is gained the particular location The secondary control system is a short-range control and was
point and will either stop or move to the next location point. realized with RC remote from car model. The figure 4 shows
Robot will move straight forward calculating its moving the selected solution.
direction and adjusting itself according that. The 5 meter
distance was selected because the robot has the turning radius
and if this is bigger than target distance error then the robot
might just start to cycle over the location point.
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they acquired good practice in project management and

teamwork where experience shows that synergistic teamwork
is often quite difficult to reach. An important experience is
also an integration of the results between the development
teams, which is also very difficult to archive. However the
course is almost always claimed as much more interesting and
useful than conventional ones. Nevertheless this sets high
demands for the supervisors and need much more work to deal
with all problems during the course. The full report is
available in our public website mechatronic.ttu.ee [4].

Figure 4 RC remote control transmitter & receiver REFERENCES

[1] European Robotics Platform, [WWW]
PWM1 - Steering (PIN C7)
http://www.robotics-platform.eu.com/, 2007-03-01.
PWM2 - Throttle (PIN C6)
[2] Worldwide Market, International Robotic Association,
PWM3 - Auxiliary
[WWW],
http://www.robotinvestments.com/RI_worldwide_market.
The communication protocol was chosen after the comparative
htm, 2007-02-20.
analyze of different available protocols. Selected data
[3] ModBus [WWW] http://www.modbus.org, 2007-03-01.
exchange protocol was ModBus [3] due the proven error
[4] Mechatronics project MHK0020 [WWW],
handling and simple architecture. The control architecture is
http://mechatronics.ttu.ee/.
shown on figure 5.

Figure 5 Control and communication diagram

The sensor system of the solution exploits mainly ultra sonic

sonars SRF08 as a side and back sensing devices. In front, a
long-range laser scanner Sick LMS291 is used. For this year
the project is ended and next year new teams will continue the
development and practical application is hopefully archived.

III. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a practical mechatronics project and the
achievements of student teams. The feedback of this kind of
mechatronics courses is very excellent and students learn much
more compared with conventional lectures. They spend
working time usually more than expected by the curriculum
and stay in laboratory much often than required. In addition

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