SENIOR DESIGN: AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC RACECARS

Abstract

In Senior Design (ENGR 498), interdisciplinary groups of engineering students work with a sponsoring company to complete a project over two semesters. Nicolas Cornejo-Lopez, Ezra Depineda, Malcolm Neifeld, Ryan Prather, and I worked with local engineering firm Tucson Embedded Systems (TES-I) on the project Autonomous Robotic Racecars. The goal of the project was to iteratively design and build two 1/10 scale cars that can autonomously navigate a custom-made track. This was done with guidance from existing organizations like F1Tenth (an international organization dedicated to the development and competition of autonomous 1/10 scale cars) and past years of Senior Design experience from TES-I. To ensure we go beyond existing work, however, an additional goal from our sponsor was to make all components relating to autonomous navigation modular. To this goal, we developed the RACE (Removable Autonomous Computing Electronics) module, a sub-chassis that can be removed and installed onto other similarly scaled cars to provide autonomous capabilities. Both cars were able to drive autonomously around our custom track, meeting all requirements and demonstrating the accessibility of autonomous vehicles.