Pushing the boundaries for driverless vehicles
I recently spent some time with Paul Fleck, President of DataSpeed Inc., at a closed circuit in France to talk through his company’s technology.
One of the technologies developed by his Michigan-based company has echoes from an earlier part of Paul’s career. With a background in electrical engineering as a drive-by-wire specialist, Paul cut his professional teeth in the 1990s Ford-run F1 outfit Benetton, working alongside Michael Schumacher in his heyday.
And while fly-by-wire technology was later banned in F1, its evolution has had a lasting impact and is now regularly found in robotics and cars.
DataSpeed has taken the drive-by-wire approach to another level, and provides a multi-point interface to specific donor vehicles, in this particular case, a Ford Mondeo (also known as the Fusion in the US) which can then be used as a base vehicle on which autonomous vehicle software and algorithms can be developed.
Other companies produce similar hardware for other vehicles, of course, and we’ll be looking at those when the opportunity arises, but I’m writing this to put this vehicle into context – this is what you start with before you have an autonomous vehicle: a blank canvas research platform.
Three obvious bits of equipment sit in the front of the car: a laptop, small touch-screen unit and – somewhat interestingly – an XBox controller. There’s quite a bit more tucked out of sight behind the back seat, and some sensors on the roof as well.
“The touch-screen display enables us to turn power on and off our various electronics, engineers love because if something doesn’t work, they can reset it and it works again magically.”
“The laptop is acting as the computing platform bringing the joystick commands and converting them to a protocol on the CAN network, which in turn interfaces with our drive-by-wire system on the vehicle and that’s how we’re able to control it – using an Xbox controller.”
The laptop has some of DataSpeed’s own software running on a version of Linux called Ubuntu, along with RViz, part of the ROS system often found in robotics development.
Paul enables the computer control by hitting two buttons on the vehicle’s steering wheel, and a number of codes flash across the laptop’s screen. Paul flicks a few buttons on the Xbox controller, showing the brakes, throttle and steering control while the vehicle is parked, before we started to drive off.