With mbed brain, my 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, "Troubled Child" drove itself to victory in a robot competition over the weekend.

Yes, you read that right. We made my Jeep into an autonomous vehicle. With an mbed in control.

Here are videos from inside and outside on the Jeep's third run:

This past Saturday was the 2014 Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC). Robots have to navigate themselves around a parking lot course at the Boulder Reservoir. Cumulative scores from three runs determine the winner. While only a few make it around, we had three flawless runs and won 1st place in our class.

Our team fielded the first full size vehicle in the competition's history. We used the same baseboard hardware and mbed software that took my RC car, "Data Bus," to 3rd place in 2012.

We spent a lot of time thinking about and implementing safety. We had me behind the wheel plus a copilot watching a laptop displaying telemetry and a ground spotter in radio contact. The vehicle has a failsafe brake actuator and emergency stop button. The mbed had control of steering. I had control of brake and throttle. And so on.

You can read more about the Jeep here: http://www.bot-thoughts.com/2014/06/avc-sharc-fsv.html

Congrats. Well done!

This is awesome! What happened the first 2 runs? Did you have to continually tweak the control algorithm?

Well done :-) Appreciate sharing code on github.

Thanks all! We had 3/3 flawless runs! The last time we touched code and waypoints was the previous night. Everything worked beautifully on Saturday.

Run 1 video from the Sparkfun live feed, with intro, run starts about 1:22:02:

Here's the 2nd run.

For convenience here is the link to the FSV branch of my Data Bus code that ran the Jeep: https://github.com/shimniok/diyrovers/tree/FSV/DataBus

I used the mbed SDK, offline compile using GNU ARM embedded toolchain.

Interested in making your own rover for AVC? Contact me. This code base is geared toward experimenters (versus APM:Rover which is more for plug and play). Also, come join us on diyrovers Google Group: http://is.gd/diyrovers

I also designed a baseboard for mbed LPC1768 / LPCXpresso 1769 that I used on the Jeep and Data Bus. It's on Tindie, just search for RoverBaseboard.