Zeus: A System Description of the Two-Time Winner of the Collegiate SAE AutoDrive Competition
This work addresses the problem of building a practical self-driving vehicle for educational and research purposes, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific competition.
The paper describes Zeus, a self-driving car system developed by aUToronto that won the SAE AutoDrive Challenge in 2019, tackling autonomous navigation through intersections with pedestrians and traffic signals, achieving success in a competition setting with limited resources.
The SAE AutoDrive Challenge is a three-year collegiate competition to develop a self-driving car by 2020. The second year of the competition was held in June 2019 at MCity, a mock town built for self-driving car testing at the University of Michigan. Teams were required to autonomously navigate a series of intersections while handling pedestrians, traffic lights, and traffic signs. Zeus is aUToronto's winning entry in the AutoDrive Challenge. This article describes the system design and development of Zeus as well as many of the lessons learned along the way. This includes details on the team's organizational structure, sensor suite, software components, and performance at the Year 2 competition. With a team of mostly undergraduates and minimal resources, aUToronto has made progress towards a functioning self-driving vehicle, in just two years. This article may prove valuable to researchers looking to develop their own self-driving platform.