Race Car Update 1

The FIX IT team is very excited to be participating in the Autonomous Race Car Competition in Cambridge, Massachusetts this summer. For students in the United States, they will be participating in the Beaverworks summer program. Our team has been working through the material online.

This weekend, Ethan and Ines got the car running using an autonomous wall following program! It uses the LIDAR to try to keep the car a set distance from the wall.

At first, the driving was a bit jerky and slow. It took the car almost a minute to drive around the course we created. (Thanks to the Vancouver Island Tech Park and Makerspace for letting us use the space!)

They after some testing and software changes, they were able to the time in half! The wall following program took 27 seconds to complete the course in it’s final tests.

Next up: Using Open CV for line following.