The key to winning a race is not to stand still, say UWindsor engineering students whose robot took top honours in the Autonomous Racing Challenge, July 11 at the University of Waterloo. It was the second straight year that Team Invincible beat out national competition to win the challenge, which puts vehicles through their paces without human guidance or control.

The Windsor entry won all three stages of the contest—a drag race, a circuit course, and static judging.

"Many of the other entries this year were based on our winning design from last year," said team leader Sid Ahuja, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering. "Fortunately, we had made improvements that allowed us to keep ahead of the competition."

Ahuja said this year's race was especially challenging because it incorporated stop signs, traffic lights, and moving obstacles on a track shaped in a figure eight. His Invincible teammates—fellow doctoral student Thanh Nguyen and Michael Stolarchuk, who just graduated from Belle River High School—were up to the challenge.

The new design used two camera sensors, each more powerful than last year's version, and Nguyen improved on his programming to process 70 frames per second, more than double last year's speed. He added a three-dimensional tracking capacity so that robot was better able to recognize its position.

"This year's model is four-wheel drive, using two DC motors," Stolarchuk said. The vehicle is capable of a top speed of more than 100 kilometres per hour, although it did not need to come anywhere near that during the competition.

"Not bad for a total budget of about $3,300," added Ahuja, who pointed out other teams, notably those from the University of British Columbia, were working with as much as 10 times more money.

The Windsor team received support from a number of sources, including the University of Windsor Alumni Association, the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, and professor Jonathan Wu's Computer Vision and Sensing Systems Laboratory—where both Ahuja and Thanh work.

Find more information and photos of the team in Waterloo.

Two-time champions: UWindsor's Team Invincible—from left, Sid Ahuja, Michael Stolarchuk, and Thanh Nguyen—successfully defended their title at the Autonomous Racing Challenge with their robot, nicknamed i2.

- News Story courtesy of University of Windsor Daily News