Troubled Child, a full-size autonomous vehicle

Posted by Jeremy on 27 June 2014

The folks from SHARC have converted a Jeep into an autonomous robot for SparkFun’s annual Autonomous Vehicle Competition that took place last weekend. Their robot, Troubled Child, won first place in its class and the “Crowd Favorite” award.

Long-time customer Michael Shimniok (our first blog post — from before we called it a blog — was about a tutorial he wrote for programming AVRs from a Mac) used his 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer to explore the back roads of Colorado and Utah before converting it into an autonomous vehicle. The autonomous Jeep uses our D15V35F5S3 switching step-down voltage regulator for powering the on-board electronics, and our dual relay board for running the warning horn and deactivating the pneumatic brake failsafe.

You can check out their final run from inside the vehicle in the video below.

For more information on Troubled Child and the team behind the build, check out their build page or forum post.

2 comments

As part of the build team on Troubled Child I can say that the Pololu relay board worked great (once we discovered that the 12V relay board does not work at 5V, but the 5V version works great!). It was really nice that we could trigger the relays with a 3.3V signal.
Hello, Ted.

Thanks for the kind words about our relay board. I am glad to hear that it worked well in Troubled Child.

Again, congratulations to you and the rest of the team for the amazing build and accomplishment!

- Jeremy

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