  We present a small autonomous vehicle, with the purpose of aiding teachers
and researchers to easily deploy different approaches to guidance, control and
positioning systems, without the hassle to develop the entire modules required
for such endeavor. The design was mainly guided to accomplish a very small
cost, along with easy accessibility of the parts used. One of the main problems
of using low cost parts is the difficulty of modeling its dynamics, mainly
because they lack proper documentation and also because the time varying nature
of its characteristics, due to degradation caused by usage. At the same time,
any change made to the physical design of the vehicle must be reflected in the
mathematical model. We develop a methodology for easy reconfiguration of the
vehicle, being able to obtain detailed dynamic mathematical models of the
system, as well as a the statistical models needed when implementing stochastic
methods such as Kalman Filtering. Baseline example implementations of guidance,
control and positioning systems are provided. The hole system is autonomous and
self-contained and was tested in a low cost embedded system.
