HOUND Prototype- SUGV

I designed and built this vehicle as a senior project.

The vehicle is loosely based on the army MarcBot, one of the first sugv's, but with some upgrades specially in the sensors, GUI and control platform.

The main purpose of this vehicle was to prove that was possible to design, build and test a fully functional sugv under 3 months and with a extremely limited budged (under 1000€)

We achieved this by using comercially available platforms and a rapid prototyping development.

Since our main objective was not a full commercial product, we were lax on the robustness of the build, but the vehicle worked great during the field test.

The main components are:

• Mechanical arm based on hobby servos
• RC 4×4 crawler chassis
• .net microframework compatible board
• WiFi communications
• Wireless camera
• GPS
• accelerometer
• Gas sensor
• Temperature sensor
• Laptop base station

Some of the insteresting features are a safe mode that detects if the vehicle lost connection and tries to find his way home (without obstacule avoidance) and protects his arm by lowering it and entering lock down mode.

The GUI has a HUD type so the user can always keep the eyes on the road at all times.

Concept diagram

GUI screenshot

I will put more media during time and code, feel free to comment and ask questions. Check the link for additional information and the build log (still in the making)