Autonomous Electric Race Car Design
This work addresses the development of autonomous electric vehicles for specific high-performance applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies in a new context.
The paper tackled the problem of converting a standard electric vehicle into an autonomous system capable of operating in challenging environments like Swiss mountain passes, achieving state-of-the-art results in localization and controls for self-driving high-performance electric vehicles.
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.