Terrain mapping for autonomous vehicle by training

This paper describes an attempt to develop a vehicle that maps the terrain of operation and acquires the path data that it has to move subsequently through a training process conducted by a human user who merely pushes the vehicle along the perimeter of the terrain, say a living room. This feature of the design provides a user-friendly, economical and straight forward means of setting and commanding the operation of an autonomous vehicle. The vehicle is a tricycle configuration with two front wheels which serve both for steering and driving, and one passive load-bearing rear wheel. An ultrasonic ranging system is mounted on the vehicle to provide the vehicle the ranges of the wall boundaries, as well as detecting the presence of obstacles in the vehicle´s path during navigation