Back to Projects
completed

Autonomous Delivery Vehicle - Area99

Last-mile autonomous delivery vehicle engineering — mechanical prototyping, steer-by-wire chassis kinematics, embedded vehicle control, ROS 2 integration, sensor fusion, simulation, and cloud infrastructure.

ROS 2Jetson AGX OrinSTM32CAN BusMicro-ROSSteer-by-WireSensor FusionCARLAKubernetes
Specifications
  • —Chassis prototype designed and manufactured, with advanced steer-by-wire chassis kinematics
  • —Contributed to the company's core mechanical IP generation
  • —Embedded Vehicle Control Units bridging low-level actuation with the ROS 2 autonomy stack
  • —Mechatronic cargo system — design, prototyping, and full software-hardware integration
  • —Automotive sensor integration (lidar, stereo cameras), point cloud processing, multi-sensor fusion
  • —CARLA simulation environment; self-hosted Kubernetes with GitOps deployment

Overview

Area99 is a last-mile autonomous delivery vehicle program. My work covered the vehicle's full technical stack — mechanical prototyping, embedded control, the ROS 2 software stack, sensor integration, simulation, and cloud infrastructure. This page describes the engineering disciplines I worked across; product-specific designs and internals stay with the company.

Mechanical Design & Chassis Prototyping

  • Designed and manufactured the vehicle's first chassis prototype, integrating the drive and suspension assemblies into a working platform.
  • Designed and integrated advanced steer-by-wire chassis kinematics, bringing electronic steering from concept to a driving prototype.
  • Contributed to the company's core mechanical IP generation.

Mechatronic Cargo Systems

  • Designed and prototyped the delivery cargo system, taking it from concept to a working, software-controlled prototype.
  • Owned the mechatronic integration end to end — actuation, embedded firmware, and the interface to the vehicle's software stack — ensuring seamless software-hardware integration for automated delivery workflows.

Embedded Systems & Vehicle Control

  • Developed and integrated embedded Vehicle Control Units, bridging low-level actuation with the high-level compute platform via robust vehicle communication protocols.
  • Owned the hardware/software integration across the platform: bring-up of the main compute, ROS 2 connectivity across subsystems, and closing the loop from software commands to physical motion.
  • Focused on steer-by-wire control as the central integration challenge between the autonomy stack and the actuators.

Perception & Sensor Integration

  • Completed the first integration test campaign for the vehicle's lidar and stereo camera sensing, including the automotive-grade physical transport layer (GMSL serializer/deserializer links, Fakra connectors).
  • Worked on point cloud processing and multi-sensor fusion across lidar, camera, and ultrasonic data, with fused close-range awareness around the vehicle body.

Simulation & Autonomy Groundwork

  • Set up a CARLA simulation environment and ran test scenarios in it — exercising autonomy logic without risking the physical prototype.
  • Evaluated open-source autonomy frameworks in depth and mapped how they would integrate with the vehicle platform.

Cloud Infrastructure

  • Stood up self-hosted Kubernetes infrastructure with GitOps-style deployment workflows (ArgoCD) supporting the platform's services.
Project: area99-autonomous-delivery-vehicle
ReturnTerminate Session