Project Drive is a year long student run project hosted and funded by the IEEE Branch of the University of California, San Diego. The premise of this project is to build a 1/10 scale fully autonomous race car with no GPS that would compete in the SparkFun 2017 Speed Demons Autonomous Vehicle Competition.
After a full year of incredible hard work and dedication from every member of the team, we are proud to say that we have successfully completed in the SparkFun Speed Demons Competition, placing #1 in the higher education category and #2 overall!! Given the circumstance, that every member came in with very little knowledge on the technology/software we were using (ROS, OpenCV, Sensors, etc.) and no additional guidance from any university staffs, this was truely an incredible feat to achieve for the team and we are extremely proud to see how much we have accomplished and learn throughout this short yet fast paced journey.
As a result, we have created a separate dedicated website to not only showcase our work, but also shed light on the various challenges and struggles we encountered along the way as newcomers to the autonomous vehicle field. By sharing how we tackled each of those challenges, the hardware we used/designed, and our underlying algorithm, we hope this site will provide helpful insights and tips that will be the catalyst for discovering new autonomous vehicle ideas and techniques, while at the same time, inspiring those whom have not worked with this field to test the water and take part of this amazing expedition.
Website Link: https://peternmai.github.io/ProjectDrive16_17/
For those whom are interested in the journey we took to get to where we are today, we have also documented much of our progress which can be seen below.
- Fall Quarter (Planning and Purchasing)
- Winter Quarter (Custom 360 LIDAR System and SLAM)
- Spring Quarter (SLAM Testing and Navigation)
- Summer and Early Fall (Custom Navigation Modules and Optimization)
- Please visit our official project website for more information