Sterling Baldwin

Starting in the fall of 2013, I worked as the lead programmer for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle project for the American Institute of Mechatronic Engineers. The project was to build a robotic platform that would be able to autonomously carry a 50kg payload through an obstacle course, knowing nothing about the course before hand except its target coordinates. The project uses a stereo camera vision system to image the robots surroundings and stay within the boundaries of the course, as well as identify and avoid the obstacles laied out in the course. The affectionally named Ground Intelligent Vehicle (GIR) used a Galil motion controller to drive two re-purposed wheel chair motors as its main drive system, and an Arduino GPS board for localization. For the vision system GIR uses the Point Cloud Library to hold and process the 3D images from the camera. Unfortunately I was forced to hand off the project at the beginning of the Spring ’15 semester after taking the internship at LLNL.