XSensible

Recently we took delivery of one of the sensors we will be using in our Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge vehicle, an XSens MTi-G.


The MTi-G is an attitude-heading reference system (AHRS) which fuses information from accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, barometer and GPS. It's a pretty tiny unit and although space isn't an issue for us in the GCDC this is an important factor for future robotics projects here at Halmstad. Since we want to send as high quality information as possible about our own car to our "opponents" (our fellow platoon members) we'll be using the MTi-G for situations which are tricky to handle only with our Trimble RTK GPS (which has good absolute location precision but is pretty vulnerable to signal dropouts and doesn't provide very useful attitude data).

The documentation that came with the MTi-G was really nice and it was a pretty quick job to integrate it into our LCM-based system using its open serial communication specification.

The following video shows another XSens sensor (sans GPS) in action:

Crazy friend

WiFi company Arada Systems apparently launched a new line, called LocoMate, of 5.9GHz on-board and road-side units at the ITS World Congress in Busan, Korea last week. Looking at the spec sheet of the OBU it looks like a pretty versatile (Bluetooth/GPS/CAN) communication device for V2V/V2I development, it also comes with a Windows/Linux SDK according to the Marketwire press-release (which seems a little confused, who knew iPhone's had CAN-bus interfaces?)

Vehicle-infrastructure cooperation

This is another type of vehicle-infrastructure cooperation than what I usually write about. Developed by a FuelMatics, it is supposedly the worlds first automatic drive-thru refueling system. Although I have sincere doubts about how robust such a system would be in the long-run I guess people may be willing to pay not to have to get out of the car.



On the electric-vehicle scene automated battery swapping would be the analogy.