14 The PIX Moving KuaiKai: Building a Self-Driving Car in Seven Days
David Wong, Alexander Carballo, Rohan Rao, Oscar Rovira, Chuan Yu · 2020
The rapid advances in sensing and computing technologies in recent years have made the use of self-driving cars in our everyday lives seem like a more and more achievable goal. As open-source software platforms for autonomous driving have matured, and the required sensors fall in price, conducting research in self-driving has become more easily accessible. Aimed at further reducing the barrier to entry of developing self-driving technologies, the PIX Moving “KuaiKai” was held as a self-driving hackathon in Guiyang City, Guizhou, China, between May 20 to 27, 2018. Armed with two electric vehicles and a variety of off-the-shelf sensors, thirteen entrants combined their efforts to build a self-driving car to race with a human driver on a pre-defined circuit, with a set of everyday driving tasks and obstacles to overcome. This chapter describes the competition structure and the technical details of the systems which were designed and implemented. Although it was constructed in only seven days, the final vehicle was capable of completing the circuit autonomously and could perform a number of localization, perception, and path planning tasks.