My team’s senior design project was a campus guide vehicle prototype. The campus guide vehicle is a prototype for an auto-driving vehicle that is battery-powered, sensor driven, and has mobile app connectivity. Students and faculty of all ages will greatly benefit from this technology. After downloading the mobile app, the user connects to the car via Bluetooth, choose a destination in the app from one of the available buildings in the ASU campus and send the order to the car via Bluetooth. The car starts to navigate autonomously to the target using pre-programmed GPS waypoints and a variety of sensors.

One of the shinning features of this project is the ability of the car to determine the fastest route to the destination. To do this, the car uses the pre-programmed map and statistics of the expected vehicle velocity in each path in the campus. The route-finding algorithm was fully and solely developed by me and it does a perfect job in finding the route with the shortest time-of-travel between the pick-up location and the destination.

The software presented here is a complete simulation environment developed in C# to generate randomized maps according to adjustable parameters (such as number of nodes, min and max number of connections-per-node, etc) and then test the route-finding algorithm on it. When a map is generated, the screen displays the randomly-assigned velocity and the distance for every path (connecting line between two nodes). Travel time between any two nodes is simply the distance/velocity. The simulation also has measurement feature to calculate the distance and the time of travel manually for any route to make sure that no route between source and destination has shorter travel-time than the one proposed by the algorithm.

Two videos are presented, one short and silent 1:40 demonstration, and the other is more detailed and narrated.