Our Guests from Elbflorace

During the disciplines in the international design competition, the self-driving vehicle must independently master various tasks and routes under different conditions:

In the Skid Pad, the environment is almost completely known, all pylons are set up according to exact specifications. The aim of the skid pad is to negotiate first two right turns and then two left turns in the shortest possible time.

In Trackdrive, the track is completely unknown, so first the track has to be mapped using SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), for example, as the Dresden team did. Then, based on a complete map, a trajectory is calculated, which then has to be travelled by the driverless vehicle several times.

In order to be able to recognise the pylons that define the route, the Dresden team relies on two mono-cameras and several LiDAR heads (both rotating and solid state). With the help of artificial intelligence, the cones (pylons) are recognised on the images as well as on the point clouds and fused in SLAM.

At the presentation in Chemnitz, the participants were able to see directly on a monitor what the sensors see and what the AI can recognise. In a question and answer session and a joint barbecue, questions could be asked, experiences exchanged, new ideas generated and shop talk exchanged.