Unmanned Ground Vehicle

The Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) was a Cal Poly Pomona platform developed for the Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project (NGCP). The mission of the project was to develop a system of vehicles that autonomously communicate with each other to specify a target location with a quadcopter, deliver a payload to the location via fixed wing plane, then retrieve the payload with either a ground or under water vehicle and bring it back to home base.

To perform the mission, the UGV utilized GPS for waypoint navigation in conjunction with a LIDAR unit for collision avoidance. For times when GPS signal was not available, an IMU and wheel encoders provided a means for dead reckoning. A gimbal mounted camera and time of flight sensor were used for identifying the payload and its relative position. A 3 degree of freedom arm was mounted to the front of the vehicle to pick up the payload. The vehicle was designed in SolidWorks, coded in C# and VHDL, and simulated in VREP.

During my second year working on the NGCP project, I had the opportunity as Team Lead to oversee the development of the UGV. My duties were to generate the system requirements for the mission, and develop the high level direction needed to demonstrate completion of the mission in 8 months. This was accomplished through developing a modified Kanban project management method which assisted in the communication and documentation of progress and testing, while promoting ownership of project subsystems. Additionally, my responsibility included representing the team in SRR, PDR, and CDR meetings with Northrop Grumman.