An autonomous indoor navigation vehicle
The Wilson project aims to: determine what is the minimum set of information necessary for a vehicle to navigate indoors without human assistance, define the sensors required to obtain such information, and develop the algorithms and techniques to govern its movement.
Since an indoor vehicle is limited by size and energy consumption, the economy of means will be a key factor.
Another design requirement is to operate without GPS, given its nature of indoor vehicle, and it is taken as a premise that any satellite not radio signal from outside can be used for positioning.
The project comprises two parts: the vehicle itself and the cloud. The cloud provides process capacity and data access. The cloud communicates with the vehicle to obtain the information from the sensors and thereby make decisions for its governance. Since the resources in the vehicle will always be limited due to size and power constrains, the project seeks for the right balance of tasks distribution between vehicle and cloud.
The project is divided into progressive stages in order to facilitate participant joining. The outcome of the first one is a vehicle controlled via a WEB application running on a mobile. This application plays the role of the cloud in later stages. This basic configuration of Wilson is using neither sensors nor cloud intelligence. It is simply a vehicle that moves. However, you get a functional first result that shows like in this video.
