Autonomous Electric Race Car Design
Niklas Funk, Nikhilesh Alatur, Robin Deuber, Frederick Gonon, Nico Messikommer, Julian Nubert, Moritz Patriarca, Simon Schaefer, Dominic Scotoni, Nicholas Bünger, Renaud Dubé, Raghav Khanna, Mark G. Pfeiffer, Erik Wilhelm, Roland Siegwart · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2017
Autonomous driving and electric vehicles are nowadays very active research and development areas. In this paper we present the conversion of a standard Kyburz eRod into an autonomous vehicle that can be operated in challenging environments such as Swiss mountain passes. The overall hardware and software architectures are described in detail with a special emphasis on the sensor requirements for autonomous vehicles operating in partially structured environments. Furthermore, the design process itself and the finalized system architecture are presented. The work shows state of the art results in localization and controls for self-driving high-performance electric vehicles. Test results of the overall system are presented, which show the importance of generalizable state estimation algorithms to handle a plethora of conditions.