LOOMY: A platform for vision-based autonomous driving

This thesis describes the conceptualization, design and implementation of a low-cost vision-based autonomous vehicle named LOOMY. A golf cart has been ouffitted with a personal computer, a fixed foward-looking camera, and the necessary actuators to facilitate driving operations. Steering, braking, and speed control actuators are being driven in open-loop with no sort of local feedback. The only source of feedback to the system is through the image sequence obtained from the camera. The images are processed and the relative information is extracted and applied to the navigation task. The implemented task is to follow another vehicle, tracing its actions while avoiding collisions using the visual looming cue.