Engineering Portfolio: Chris Berthelet

          This project was for my Mechanical Engineering Laboratory course at UC Berkeley; the task was to design and perform an experiment on one of four laboratory platforms. Our project was designed for the in-line roll car track apparatus, and we chose to implement and investigate adaptive cruise control. 

         

          Two miniature cars were built from scratch, and each consisted of an Arduino Nano, LiPo battery, buck converter, Brushed DC motor + controller, rotary encoder, and 3D printed mechanical chassis. The follow car additionally had an ultrasonic sensor for distance detection and a Raspberry Pi for data collection.

         

          The Arduino PID library was used to implement the adaptive cruise control algorithm (position based) on the follow car. The lead car was programmed to follow a specific velocity profile: speed up, steady speed, brake. Tests were run and data was collected to examine the effects of weight and following distance on overshoot and response rate.