Creators of autonomous cars, the Selfie Team came in third for driving and parking and six overall at the 2019 Carolo Cup International Competition at Braunschweig, Germany (February 4–5, 2019).

Students of the Robotics Student Research Group at the Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering showed their already fourth Selfie autonomous car model in Germany.

Each new iteration adds further hardware and software improvements. The present car is distinguished by a complete set of sensors to capture information about the surrounding environment. In addition to a traditional camera, precise laser sensor technology, also known as LIDAR, has also been applied. This technology, which maps the surroundings with laser beams, is the best sensor technology around and the one commonly used by autonomous car builders. “Our fourth design is the first to feature a LIDAR sensor working in parallel with a camera,” explains Michał Jarzyński. “This solution provides system redundancy of sorts as you can detect obstacles with both laser and camera.”

Demanding track and tight race

Carolo Cup is a prestigious event for student teams involved in designing small-scale autonomous cars. The competition is an opportunity for junior engineers to show their innovations to industry pros. Certainly, all concepts must prove their worth in practice, or on the track. “We entered the Basic Cup event where the task was to drive autonomously along a track with crossroads with and without priority and with temporarily disappearing lines to simulate the real-world track conditions,” says Kornelia Łukojć. “Parking in an available slot in the parking zone and avoiding obstacles on the driving path were another challenges.” All points and penalties in the competition were translated into the meters covered during the task.

The competition was extremely fierce. And this was reflected in the final scores, with teams in the 3rd and in the 6th place being just 37 meters apart and the students of the Warsaw University of Technology having lost the 5th place by a mere 3 meter margin. “We take special pride in clinching the third place for driving and parking,” says Adam Gotlib. “We managed to keep on track at a very good speed compared to our competitors. Thus, we demonstrated how stable our main algorithms were and we want to build on them to develop more complex software elements in preparation for the future instalments of this competition. This includes, say, steering the speed according to the road ahead or identifying and heeding the road signs on the route.”

Determined to be faster

This was the second Carolo Cup for the team of the Robotics Student Research Group. Last year, they finished in the 7th place with their first version of Selfie. Then, they won a competition in Canada with their second car, and car version 3 equipped with an all new self-driving architecture, ROS, made its appearance in a competition in Italy.

“We have started working on improvements to the design to drive even faster and fight for the top next year in Germany,” says Dawid Urbański. “We are planning to make the whole thing lighter and improve the axle torsion capacity, which will greatly enhance maneuvering capabilities and open up new possibilities for autonomous driving.”