Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition

Written on October 3rd , 2021 by Geoffrey Clark

In 2012 and 2013 myself and a group of friends created team 0x27 and competed in the SparkFun autonomous vehicle competition. The first year we competed in 2012, we not only won but had a robot 3x faster than any other robot competing. We used a combination of high-quality GPS and laser gyro, with a Kalman filter for sensor fusion, to determine our robot’s location along the course and a simple PID controller for trajectory tracking. Even when we hit a 50gallon barrel obstacle, our controller quickly and easily adjusted course due to our high-quality sensor data. In the 2013 competition, SparkFun opened a new level of competition for faster competitors; that year, we placed second overall and were beaten only by 1 second.