Formula student driverless

What is formula student?

Studying at the Mechanical Engineering building at the TU Delft, formula student is a well known term. In Delft, every year a group of highly motivated students put their studies on hold to build a race car completely from scratch! They don’t just build it for the heck of it, but the goal is to make a better car than competing univserities throughout the world and win first place in multiple student engineering competitions.

Driverless?

The formula student engineering competitions aim to reflect developments of the automotive industry. That is why in 2010 a new electric category was introduced. Naturally, in 2016 a third driveless category was added.

In 2018-2019 I had just started my MSc in vehicle engineering and coincidentally Formula Student Team Delft (FSTD) was looking to start to compete in the driveless category. Lured by the cool factor of building an autonomous race car! I decided to put my studies on hold for a year and join the team.

Instead of building an entirely new racecar, we had the opportunity to modify the 2018 electric car. By adding a LiDAR sensor at the nose of the car, and multiple cameras on the roll hoop, we could sense important obstacles around the car. To get a better idea of what this all means, take a look at this video:

The racecar detects and tracks the cones that mark the edges of the track. The detected cones are used to build a map of the track, localize the car and estimate where the boundaries and middle line of the track are. Finally a Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm is used to follow the line as fast as possible, in the video the MPC horizon is visualized by blue circles.