Rapid Autonomous Intervention Vehicle
Senior capstone project — an autonomous vehicle that homes on a target by detecting a strobe light, then hands off to operator control for precision maneuvering.
The RAIV was built as my senior capstone project at UCLA. Rather than GPS or pre-programmed paths, it homes autonomously on a target by detecting a strobe light through an onboard camera pipeline. The image processing algorithm identifies the strobe, computes angular error, and drives a PID controller to steer the vehicle toward it.
Once the vehicle reaches the target, the operator switches to manual mode and takes direct control for precision maneuvering. The dual-mode architecture — autonomous homing followed by human-in-the-loop control — was the core design requirement driving the system.
Key challenges included making the strobe detection robust under varying ambient light conditions, minimizing control lag from camera capture to actuation, and designing a clean mode-switch handoff that didn't introduce instability at the transition.
