The project implements an Emergency Breaking system for the Technion’s Autonomous Formula vehicle. The system activates emergency breaking upon detecting severe failure in any of the vehicle’s subsystems. The solution has to operate in a very unstable and hazardous environment and supply an almost immediate reaction for failure.
This project is part of the Technion’s Autonomous formula vehicle – a cross faculty effort to produce an autonomous self-driving racing vehicle. Aimed to compete in the international Formula Student series at the driverless competition. This project main goal is to supply a critical safety feature to the autonomous vehicle – initiating an emergency stop.
The project uses non-programmable components installed on a self-designed PCB (a demand prescribed by the formula competitions rules) to monitor the vehicles critical subsystems operation state. In case of a single failure detection, the PCB triggers a mechanical emergency breaking mechanism.
As part of monitoring the vehicle’s systems state the solution is also responsible to handle the vehicle operating state machine. Thus, preventing the vehicle from entering autonomous driving mode without passing the subsystem’s functionality tests.
The project’s uses various analog logical gates such as multi AND/OR gates as well as Flip Flops to maintain the vehicle’s different operating states. The usage of the analog gates, as well as the fact of the PCB being inside an unstable motor vehicle – both physically and electrically, requires implementing current protections, both for the PCB’s inputs and outputs.
