Automotive Sensor Fusion Collision Avoidance System

The Automotive Sensor Fusion Collision Avoidance System, a University of Arizona Engineering senior design project sponsored by Texas Instruments. The deadline for completion of this project was April 30, 2018, otherwise known as Design Day. The team consisted of six members of the following disciplines: Engineering Management, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Optical Sciences and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

Overall, the goal of this project was to develop an Automotive Sensor Fusion Collision Avoidance System that will in the long run help advance how safe vehicles will be. This is a necessary development in the automotive industry because of how dangerous cars are and how slow humans can be at making split second decisions. The goal of the project was to implement both LiDAR and Sonar sensors, mounted on a remote control car, in order to tell if an obstacle is present in the cars path, and then stop the car when it is determined that a collision with this obstacle is imminent. The car will also send data including obstacle distance and car speed to a graphical user interface (GUI). The need for sensor fusion is to cover all possible situations and obstacles, where if one sensor fails, the other sensor will detect and still avoid the crash.

Texas Instruments parts were critical to the success of the project. The parts used included Transimpedance Amplifier OPA858, Hercules MCU TMS570LS1227PGE, Time to Digital Converter TDC7201, Comparator TLV3501, Analog Switch TS5A3159, and Voltage Regulator TPS767-Q1. Each part from TI is ideal for automotive purposes and/or range finding devices.

The project consists of a remote control car with a battery, a microcontroller, a bluetooth module, a GUI (Graphical User Interface) interface, and three sensors. The three sensors are sonar modules, a LiDAR module, and a hall effect sensor. The three sensors will interface only with the microcontroller and are powered by the microcontroller. The LiDAR module will interface with the microcontroller through SPI while the Sonar and Hall effect sensor will interface using GPIO (General Purpose Input Output). The microcontroller will also interface with the car’s motor using a PWM (pulse width modulated) signal, and well as the bluetooth module using UART communication. The car battery will be used to power the car as well as the microcontroller and the bluetooth module. Lastly, there is a GUI interface that will be run on a PC that interfaces with the Bluetooth module.