Design and Implementation of an Affordable GPS Based Rover for Path Planning with Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract

In this paper, the design and development of an affordable GPS-guided autonomous rover that is real-time optimized for path and obstacle avoidance are presented. The system was built based on an ESP32 microcontroller, BN-880 GPS receiver and HC-SR04 ultrasonic ranging sensor with PID control law for directive adjustments. For safe travel, the rover used conditional statement and Vector Field Histogram (VFH) algorithm to determine real time path along a 180-degree field-of-scan falloff. In-field investigation at Dewan Ilmu Parking Lot, Universiti Malaysia Perlis tested the crucial behaviours of this system like GPS positional accuracies, reliability to avoid obstacle and stability of trajectory in PID control and non-PID configurations. The rover maintained a GPS precision radius to 2.5 meters and achieved a 100 percent success rate in obstacle avoidance. Quantitative comparisons revealed that PID-controlled navigation offered superior directional stability and turned more smoothly, whereas non-PID navigation yielded faster completion times but exhibited larger deviation errors. These results demonstrate the feasibility of developing an inexpensive and modular autonomous mobility platform for applications such as agricultural robotics, industrial surveillance and even field exploration.