With the rise of autonomous cars in recent years, our team responded in the only way we know – with curiosity, enthusiasm, and dedication. Thus we founded the AI team which seeks to give students an opportunity to get into the exciting field of driverless cars, apply their classroom knowledge to a real project, obtain experience in collaborating in a group and of course race the car at Formula Student events around the globe!

The team

In October 2017, EUFS expanded with a brand new project, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) team. We aim to retrofit one of the previous EUFS Class 1 cars into a fully electric self-driving race car and participate in international student competitions as part of Formula Student Driverless. As an intermediate step to that goal, we participated in the IMechE’s FS-AI competition where we created the software for a self-driving car and applied it to a vehicle provided by the competition organisers (the one you see on the pictures here). Thus far, we have won all 2 competitions ran – in 2018 and 2019.

This is the more mechanical engineering part of the team who are responsible for the retrofitting and design of the chassis, suspension and bodywork of the car. This subteam works closely with all other subteams as anything that goes on the car must be put there by the vehicle dynamics subteam.

Potential projects:
– Emergency Braking System
– Motor and battery cooling systmes
– Steering actuation system
– Lot and lots of component mounting

This subteam develops the electric powertrain of the car which makes it move. This involves creating the battery system, wiring the high voltage lines, driving the motor and developing the motor control system. If you want to get into the electric future of cars, then this is the subteam for you!

Potential projects:
– Battery design
– Electic motor development
– Control system for electric powertrain
– High-voltage circuit design

All complex systems work because of the complex electronics behind them. Our car is no different and will feature a variety of circuits for controlling the powertrain, actuators, recording telemetry data and of course communicating with the autonomous driving software. If you like circuits and code equality, then this is the team for you!

Potential projects:
– Control circuits for actuators
– Telemetry electronics
– Sensor configuration and interfacing
– Wiring & PCB design

Responsible for making the car “see” around it. This subteam takes the sensor inputs of the car such as camera and Lidar and attempt to detect objects from their data. In this subteam you will have the opportunity to do some machine learning, computer vision and make it all run fast!

Potential projects:
– Camera object detection
– Lidar object detection
– Machine Learning algorithm development
– Object fusion

Responsible for creating a map of the racetrack and estimating the car’s location within it. This subteam also needs to estimate the dynamics of the car in order to allow it to drive faster. Here you’ll get the opportunity to do vehicle state estimation, sensor fusion, vehicle dynamics and SLAM.

Potential projects:
– Sensor fusion and position estimation
– Simultenious Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms
– Data visualisation and analysis frameworks
– Vehicle dynamics modelling

Once the car knows what is around it and where it is in the world, it can finally plan where to go and how to control itself to there. Ultimately, this is the subteam in charge of making the car go fast. Here you will get the opportunity to learn about optimal control theory, vehicle dynamics, trajectory planning and reaching the limits of performance.

Potential projects:
– Numerical optimisaiton
– Optimal control problems
– Model prediction and vehicle dynamics

In order to develop the software for the car, we need a suitable development environment, process and deployment structure. If you’re interested in system architecture, simulations, automated testing, continuous integration and much more, then this is the subteam for you.

Potential projects:
– Devops workflow development
– Environment and deployment structures
– Simulation development
– Data storage and analysis

Before we finish building our car, we need to evaluate our software in the real world, for that purpose we have developed a cheap and easy software testbed called William The Wheelchair. He plays a crucial role in our team and is our key to success. We are looking for 1 person to be responsible for the testbed in both development and deployment.

This role will require a wide variety of skills around mechatronics, software and most importantly the hack-something-to-work-for-testing-tomorrow skill. It is a unique opportunity to work on a small-scale robot project while also using some cutting-edge sensors and computing.