The Joystick Car Drive System and Its Application to Automatic Bus Driving

Abstract

With the super-aging society, to solve the various problems related to the mobility of the elderly has become a social issue. In addition, the decreasing of the number of human drivers for public transportation is a serious problem. With facing those social situations, the realization of automatic driving is highly expected. In this study, we propose to build of an automatic bus driving system by applying the joystick driving system developed earlier. The steering wheel and gas/brake pedals are activated by the electric motors of the joystick driving system. Additionally, the functions for the shift changing and blinkers and horns controls are developed. The navigation system with LIDAR, GNSS, gyro sensor and camera enables a bus to be controlled automatically with the proposed drive system. In this paper, we report the results of running tests on public roads using the developed autonomous driving bus to confirm its validity.