Employing Android devices for autonomous control of a UGV

The current availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices is driving a race to integrate such technology with a diversity of new fields. In order to explore one such largely unexplored application, this paper presents an onboard mobile device-based system for autonomous control of a UGV. Contextualised by the requirements of the Australian AGVC competition, a multi-application software suite was developed for Android, implementing a number of open-source software libraries adapted for a control system application. The developed system is capable of full soft-real time autonomous control, capitalising exclusively on the Android device's embedded sensors for data acquisition. Preliminary results indicated robust capability to perceive, map and plan paths around obstacles, and perform adequately accurate localisation in real time. The effectiveness of the system, considering minimum computational power and hardware cost, not only serves as a proof of application to drive research for the next generations of mobile devices, but garnered considerable interest in competition against classical autonomous system setups.