Autonomous Racecar Project

Over the past several decades, there has been much effort placed into making cars safer and more fuel efficient. However, the next big automobile innovation that many tech companies and the entire automobile industry is working on are self-driving cars. The main drive behind this is eliminating human error in car related accidents, increasing fuel efficiency, and to make advancements in transportation technology. Companies such as Waymo have made vast progress in autonomous car technology and are expecting to release their self-driving vehicles to the public by 2020. However, self-driving technology is not a soon to be finished problem, but an ongoing problem. This is evident in the case of various incidents related to commercial autonomous vehicles, one of the most current incident is the fatal incident related to Uber’s self-driving car in Arizona this year. The main source and motivation of this project is based on the F1/10 autonomous racecar competition. Therefore, our racecar is built to the standards of traveling at high speeds while avoiding obstacles autonomously. With that in mind, this project will be a scaled down version of the commercial autonomous vehicles. We hope that by analyzing and comparing the efficiency and performance of the various algorithms we implement, we can tackle the problems with today's autonomous vehicles with our own solutions.