System Design for a Driverless Autonomous Racing Vehicle

Abstract

The rising popularity of autonomous vehicles has led to the development of driverless racing cars, where the competitive nature of motorsport has the potential to drive innovations in autonomous vehicle technology. The challenge of racing requires the sensors, object detection and vehicle control systems to work together at the highest possible speed and computational efficiency. This paper describes an autonomous driving system for a self-driving racing vehicle application using a modest sensor suite coupled with accessible processing hardware, with an object detection system capable of a frame rate of 25fps, and a mean average precision of 92%. A modelling tool is developed in open-source software for real-time dynamic simulation of the autonomous vehicle and associated sensors, which is fully interchangeable with the real vehicle. The simulator provides performance metrics, which enables accelerated and enhanced quantitative analysis, tuning and optimisation of the autonomous control system algorithms. A design study demonstrates the ability of the simulation to assist in control system parameter tuningresulting in a 12% reduction in lap time, and an average velocity of 25 km/h -indicating the value of using simulation for the optimisation of multiple parameters in the autonomous control system.

Worsening Perception: Real-time Degradation of Autonomous Vehicle Perception Performance for Simulation of Adverse Weather Conditions

“…1. The majority of the software is a development of the work of Culley et al (2020), and is developed in Python 3.8 (Python Software Foundation, 2019) utilising the ROS2-Foxy (Open Robotics, 2020) middleware layer to connect modules.…”

“…The vehicle model and sensor behaviour simulation developed by Culley et al (2020) was used as the basis for this study. This simulation was selected as it incorporates accurate models of the vehicle dynamic behaviour, and all sensors from the autonomous vehicle -including GPS, IMU, stereoscopic cameras, and LiDAR sensors.…”

Drive-By-Wire Development Process Based on ROS for an Autonomous Electric Vehicle

“…The UK StreetDrone company has developed a Drive-By-Wire system, integrated into the Nissan e-NV200 van, the Renault Twizy and the ZOE [21]. These platforms provide all the hardware technology necessary for autonomous navigation.…”

“…The Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is calculated using Equation (21). This metric provides a rough estimate of how long you can expect to use the Drive-By-Wire without encountering faults.…”

Exhaust Prototype Design of L12B Engine

“…The world of racing/motorsports is a sport that combines the power of humans and machines to compete with each other on a racing track or circuit. The world of racing includes both car racing and motorbike racing, both of which require the physical fitness of a human being and the prime condition of the racing vehicle used, discussing the prime condition of a racing vehicle, then what is meant is how high the performance and reliability of each component installed on these vehicles [1][2][3][4][5].…”