STEERING CONTROL METHOD BASED ON TSL1401 LINEAR SENSOR ARRAY

The development of an automatic steering control system has been a major concern for most researchers towards the realization of a fully automated car in the near future. It is believed that such system could mitigate the effect of road accidents caused by human errors. Therefore, this project was carried out to develop a prototype of an intelligent car that has the capability to navigate automatically without human interference. A Freescale cup development kit was utilized in this project that consists of a development board, a servo motor, two DC drives, a driver circuit and a vision sensor. A special test track was developed using a white material with black lane along both edges of the track. A vision system, based on TSL1401 Linear Array Sensor, with 128pixels of detection resolution was developed to sense the track condition. The data captured by the sensor was sent to a Freescale FRDM-KL25Z processor and the steering angle of the car was determined. The programming code was written in C language using Freescale CodeWarrior software platform. A steering control method was introduced to navigate the prototype car autonomously. The method utilizes the linear sensor as it inputs parameters to identify current position of the car and determines the output parameters that dictate the car behavior. As a result, the car managed to steer automatically in various route conditions such as straight path, ramp, junction and also sharp turn.