Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Silly Race is Shaping the Future of Smart Cars”.
My name is jim burke and i’m the founder of the power racing series, so the power racing series came from basically just playing around at my hackerspace back in 2009, we found a discarded power wheel and we thought it’d be really funny if we modified them to Race, the power racing series is built on having creative fun and then the learning comes from that, instead of just trying to be the fastest and be the best, we have our moxie challenge, which makes it so that the crowd gets a vote on on the best. Looking vehicle, it changes the paradigm of how you race. It makes it more about enjoying yourself and building the best that you can and not building just the best car, the more people play or have that sort of playful interactivity with a technology or an idea that they want to pursue just for the fun of it. The more opportunities they have to learn the power raising series is built basically to adapt to that knowledge.
We know that play creates better ways to think and that thinking comes with more creative solutions to problems and that leads to learning things quicker and adapting to them. Better hi there, my name is pete, i’m with the milwaukee makerspace power racing series. Team we’ve been doing it since i think 2010 or something i’ve been doing it every year. Since so the first year uh a lot of people running for almost stock power wheels. I mean they were pretty slow, you could pretty much walk faster than them and over the years people have investigated different sort of controllers.
Uh gone to like scooter motors some people use alternators. We have one car with a floor polishing motor uh. We have a bicycle. E-Hub e-bike hub motor, which is really weird, um, yeah you’re, seeing all sorts of weird innovation over time and now we’re seeing things like uh salvaged batteries from leaf uh electric cars come in as well so the goal the power racing series has kind of changed over The years initially, it was just you know, to have fun at maker faire and meet other maker spaces and build really cool things. But after doing that for enough seasons, we started noticing that people were coming up with some really cool open source technologies, and we also had a lot more schools sign up. I’M palmer tetley we’re from tulsa oklahoma. This is our second year in it, and this is our second race.
All of our members are from first robotics teams for our car that we built last year um, since we have we’re all first members, we use parts that we’re used to from first and, as we discovered they’re, not really designed for this kind of race. So our new car, the burger car, we found more industrial parts to make it have better performance. I believe most all the team members are interested in some sort of engineering degree.
I know personally, i’m interested in either electrical engineering or mechanical engineering. We plan on doing this until at least we graduate high school and potentially in college if our team can stay together. So the power racing series realized that autonomous vehicle technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper by the year. Lidar technologies are getting more affordable and granted. They do not have the same potency nowhere near even that a 20 or 40 thousand dollar system has but 500 lidar systems and even cheaper, are getting better and better at their detection at the amount of data it takes in and the speed that it can be Taken in which means we have the ability to make smaller scale power, wheel, size, autonomous vehicles on the cheap and that’s one of the big goals that we really want to do, because autonomous technology is pretty much the future of anything automotive and transportation globally. And it’s going to be really important: to have a workforce who understands the base level of that technology.
We want to create the world where we understand the technology that we’re embedded in you don’t have to be an engineer in it, but you need to have an appreciation for it and our autonomous league is giving people the opportunity to get an idea of the technology To see it firsthand a cheaper version of it, so it’s more accessible we’re focusing on reaching out students in schools that would not have these competitions to begin with, we do not want to focus just on higher end schools. That already would have these contests. We want to support more institutions to be involved.
We don’t want teams to cost twenty thousand dollars per school. We want a thousand dollar teams and twenty schools. If you wan na find out more about the power racing series check out powerracingseries.org, you can sign up team.
You can see what races we’re going to have for the rest of the calendar, and you know if you have any questions on how to make your build email me or any of the other people on the teams, and we can get you started. You .