With the world moving towards electric vehicles to combat the problem of emissions from vehicles, this project intends to build a battery based autonomous bot by adding AI to the bot with an emphasis on solar power along with battery management. Though there are a lot of organizations trying to contribute or gain value in the autonomous domain there is no single open project to understand and contribute to autonomous bots. This project intends to fill the gap by building a bot with AI and smart energy capabilities. The first level scope is to make the bot navigate by itself between two points in a defined environment i.e. L3 autonomy level and charge itself via solar power. This involves various sensor inputs for sensor fusion; wheel encoder for speed control, Object recognition for obstacles using camera, LiDAR for depth , RADAR for trajectory tracking and a powerful edge AI device for compute. The PID feedback control for the drive is difficult to achieve via software, so this will be developed on FPGA as well as any hardware acceleration ( RADAR data processing for instance) required for sensor fusion. Efficient solar power and battery management will also be targeted. Unknown obstacles will be reported to the cloud where models are trained ( by other bots as well in larger scope) and new models will be reloaded into the bot for better AI capabilities. Note: ROS is tentative for the sensor control, PID on FPGA for drive control, RADAR usage might be out of the scope based on availability of the sensor.

Project Proposal

1. High-level project introduction and performance expectation

2. Block Diagram

3. Expected sustainability results, projected resource savings