Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Makers Fuel World’s First Autonomous Car Track Day”.
If you’re keeping up on technology news, you’ve, no doubt heard of autonomous vehicles being tested by the likes of google and tesla, but those are far from the only people involved in the business at thunderhill park, home to the first ever track day for autonomous vehicles. The scene here would seem familiar to anyone who’s ever visited hackerspace or homebrew computer club individuals in small companies, pioneering into unknown spaces, sharing ideas and solving problems together. So today we have a a bunch of companies in in automotive and techno automotive technology. Spaces that are are building interesting stuff. It’S important that we figure out.
What are what are the limitations of the technologies? Not just you know how how to do it safely, but what is what is fast? What is slow, what is what it is do in different situations right so um. The racetrack gives an interesting opportunity for different, a different environment for people to build and test for, and – and this lets us test explore. Some of these other evolutionary paths for motorsports enthusiasts attract day is an event where people can come to drive their own car on a closed course as quickly as they want it’s an opportunity to test hardware and improve their driving skills and also enjoy the community of Like-Minded folks for this group, the goals are very much the same, though just about everyone is pursuing different outcomes. Some are employing human drivers to gather data from the vehicle on track, while others, like autonomous staff, are showcasing a turnkey platform for others looking to develop a business around driverless cars.
First off, it’s it’s great. To have a community come together like this, the organizer did a great job bringing together. You know the best in this area for for testing and analyzing their their automated driving technologies, and so being here and being a part of the community has been really important for us. So what we’re showcasing here is kind of an it’s. An automated driving research development platform and there’s kind of four cores to that platform. The first core of that is the the car itself. So we have to have access to the car and the controls in the car, so the steering the braking acceleration the shifting.
So it’s really important to have a safe vehicle platform that you can use for automated driving research. So we provide that in showcasing that here today with this lincoln um. The second part of that that’s really important are the perception sensors.
So you have to have a 360 degree field of view of situational awareness around the car. So that’s important so we’re showcasing that here and the third part of that is the middleware and that’s polysync, so that pulls the data together from the car and from the sensors and the fourth part of that is the applications that we built. On top of that which allow it to drive autonomously in order for a car to navigate and drive on its own, it first needs to know where it is.
Nearly all autonomous vehicles use gps to get a general location, but most commercially available systems are only accurate to a few meters due to the inaccuracies of gps vehicles require additional sensors, such as lidar and visual cameras to further refine their navigation. These additional sensors work with the gps to help the vehicle define its navigational space uh the sensors we’re using in our car. We have three primary sensors.
We have an imu which is an inertial measurement unit, primarily we’re using a gyroscope out of that. We have a tachometer which is measuring the distance. The car travels, which is enough to get you uh dead reckoning, which is a very primitive way of figuring out where you are, and then we have the lidar, which you can see here, which is scanning the track around the car and refining the position and keeping It from drifting, which you would get with dead rack, while many of the biggest names in tech are grabbing the biggest headlines, there’s a place for anyone interested in getting started in autonomous driving.
The power racing series is a small-scale motorsports competition, which is holding its first autonomous race later this year, with the goal of building fully driverless cars using power wheels as a platform for under a thousand dollars. While there’s no shortage of ideas for how to use driverless vehicles in the service of business and transportation goals, there’s a more polarizing view of its future in motorsport racing is always served as a valuable crucible for developing technologies, but will spectators take to it without a Driver to cheer, for there are already autonomous racing series happening, uh, there’s robo race. At the high end, there’s power racing series is starting at the low end.
So i think that there’s a bunch of different things going on i’m looking to figure out like what is something that’s as close to full vehicles right. So that’s that’s, maybe starting with with go-karts and and up from there, but at the low end inexpensive that many many different people can try different things inexpensively. It shouldn’t be millions of dollars per vehicle. It should be tens of thousands. I think it can actually be really exciting right right now, where the cars are they’re, the cars are pretty slow they’re. You know it’s it’s really in its infancy, but i see, as things evolve, these cars are going to be running faster than any human driver could drive they’re going to be able to do things that you could never safely let a human do.
I think you can see incredibly fast cars that are they’re going to be driving at speeds, you’re not going to see anywhere, including formula one you know traditionally. Racing has always been about the driver and the performance of the car, and i think that there’s an there’s, a community people that don’t necessarily care about the traditional methods of racing and there’s also some crossover that care about that, but also care a lot about technology And advancement of technology so incorrect code, please .