More than 50 current and former Virginia Tech students are involved this week in a different kind of auto competition. The Autodrive Challenge is not a race, but rather, a chance to prove that autonomous vehicles can safely and successfully navigate a course, so they can one day do the same on a city street. The students have different jobs in a competition that moves around the US. This year, the Challenge is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Opponents come from places like Texas A&M, and the University of Toronto.
Tasks will range from reversing and parking, and driving around dummies that simulate real people – all without sitting behind the wheel of a Chevy Bolt.
Only some of Virginia Tech’s team will actually go to Michigan, but others may help, wherever they are, by logging in remotely. And the entire Autodrive Challenge is a 3-year process, so some team members have graduated, while others are new, like senior computer science major Saloni Goel.
She says competing brings up scenarios that her professors hadn’t thought of.
“More than the knowledge itself, it teaches you how to solve problems, so that it actually solves a real-world problem,” Goel said. “You see it running on the car, and it’s going to work. That makes you think a lot differently than just ‘theoretically this should work’ -no, I want a solution that’s going to work practically.”
George Boyer is among those participating who has already graduated. He recently spoke with students at Blacksburg schools on how self-driving cars will soon recognize other vehicles and pedestrians in a real-world setting.
“We try to educate them on what technologies we use, and how it works,” Boyer said. “Trying to expose high school students to those technologies – even we talk to some middle school students – on how can a camera and a computer figure out there’s a person there.”
Like other electric vehicles, the team car is quiet. The only real sound comes from the Lidar, the spinning object on the car’s roof, that uses invisible lasers to detect objects in its path. In a worst-case scenario, one team member sits in the passenger seat, and can hit an emergency stop button if needed.
Team member Patrick Brinza, a junior, and double major in computer engineering and math, says his team hopes to calm lingering anxieties about cars that are remotely operated.
“There’s been all this fear about self-driving cars being hacked, being able to apply the brakes, or remove the brakes,” he said. So that’s something that we’re incorporating into our system, trying to make that our car is not only safe within itself, but safe from malicious outsiders.”
During last year’s competition, the Virginia Tech team finished 3rd of 8 teams. More on the team's car and its teams can be found here.
Radio IQ is a service of Virginia Tech.
