Monday,December14:IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Autonomous Power Wheels Talk

The Pittsburgh section of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society presents a technical session about HackPGH’s designing, building, and racing an Autonomous vehicle based on a Power Wheels toy.

Meeting will be held at the HackPGH shop 1937 Watson Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15219 starting at 6:30 PM on 14 December 2015. Pizza/sandwiches will be provided.

Please register for this meeting at:

http://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/meeting_view/list_meeting/37175 

Or send an email to genekern@ieee.org

HackPGH’s Autonomous Power Wheels Racing Series Car

In September 2015, HackPittsburgh entered in the first ever autonomous racing division of the Power Racing Series (http://www.powerracingseries.org/) at World Maker Faire in New York city. The power racing series challenges entrants to build ridiculously cheap, ridiculously small race cars based on children’s Power Wheels ride-on cars, then -until now- cram a full sized adult in the drive seat. This presentation will explain their build-from-scratch, self-driving car and the technology behind it.

The car borrows its drive train from a wheel chair and fuses information from a laser scanner, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and wheel encoders to generate a map of the racetrack by means of a simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm. It then navigates through the established map while autonomously estimating the relative position within the map. The free, open-source, and community driven Robot Operating System (ROS) has been used as the underlying software platform and most software packages that were used for this project are freely available on the internet, making autonomous robots accessible to anyone.

The SLAMborghini and crew of HackPGH at MakerFaire New York.