Students from Chalmers and University of Gothenburg won the self-driving miniature vehicles student competition "Carolo Cup Junior Edition" in Germany recently. Team Dr Meili consists of seven students from the international bachelor program Software Engineering and Management and the two master programs Software Engineering and Communication Engineering, and was the first ever international team to enter the competition.
Since 2008, the Carolo Cup is an annual event for students with the goal of developing self-driving vehicles in 1:10 scale, that are able to follow lane markings, handle intersections safely, and to park on a sideways parking strip.
This year featured for the first time a "Junior Edition", since the number of teams entering the competition for the first time was large enough to form a class of their own.
Hard work and commitment
The team was assembled and supervised by Christian Berger at the Software Engineering division, and Olaf Landsiedel at the Networks and Systems division. One of the team members is Mahsa Mirtalebi, a student on the international bachelor program Software Engineering and Management. She is thrilled with the experience from working so closely with the group over five months.
– We had a commitment that I have never experienced before in any other project, we were helping each other and were totally focused on our goals and winning, she says. The schedule during the competition was full from morning to late night, the team worked hard to the end on the car and their algorithms, taping the hotel carpet to do test-runs.
Research for the automotive area
The Carolo Cup-team used knowledge and components developed at the department for the Gulliver Testbed, a research demonstrator which directly links to industry need to develop full size autonomous and cooperative vehicular systems.
‒ All important vehicle manufacturers are working with this technology in prototypical cars, they are not science fiction anymore, says Christian Berger.
The department participates in several research projects in the automotive area. For example, KARYON proposes a new system architecture for predictable and safe coordination of smart vehicles that can avoid hazardous situations on the road. Other project examples include SeFram and DFEA-2020, where security, dependability and fault tolerance aspects of communicating cars are investigated. Future plans in these projects are to further investigate into road safety for vehicles that are communicating with each other, to ensure that it is always done in a secure and dependable way.
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