Likes
An engineering team consisting of five students of SCNU won the national first prize in the 16th National University Students Smart Car Race, renewing the historical record of SCNU at this competition.
The team participated in the Baidu smart transportation project, which is a creative project based on multiple artificial intelligence technologies. According to the team's introduction, they had to devise a smart car model that could complete sophisticated tasks, such as locating and identifying a drive way, detecting traffic signs and targeting objects and so on. This is more challenging compared with previous designs that relied on remote control, sensors and mechanical structure.
The team spent more than half a year preparing for the race. During this period, they kept trying and overcame one challenge after another.
Li Jingyan, Huang Zepeng and Ouyang Junbin (from left to right) are testing their car.
At the beginning of their project, all the members believed that to make the car move was the key to success. They had no idea of the parts of the model car at first. Only by constantly trying, testing and taking a long time can they eventually made the car move. It wasn't an easy job for them to achieve their target, but success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties.
It was a task which was similar to target shooting. "We spent more than two weeks discussing, checking data and reading literature again and again. We also tried nearly four different schemes. The process was really hard for us. I even wanted to give up at some moments. Fortunately, we made it, " said Huang Chaofeng, a member of the team, mainly responsible for writing the overall program architecture of the smart vehicle, optimizing the efficient operation of the program and the overall logic of the program.
What impressed Huang most was one crazy decision they took during the competition. On the first day, they were requested to hand in the car an hour before the race started. But there was a problem with the chassis. After a heated discussion, they had no choice but to cross the Rubicon. There was no going back.
They decided to change the chassis of the car and redesign part of it. Such decision was the most dangerous in the competition. It meant that they needed to modify the procedures and adjust the strategies within one hour. This job would take at least two days if they did it in the laboratory at school. Huang said, “We made a crazy decision. But we worked together and created a miracle by the end of that hour.”
The team considered that winning the goal is worth staying up late many times for a better job. “It seemed that the boring days made a preparation for our winning. I am delighted that we defeated all the challenges,” said Huang Chaofeng. When it comes to their future plan, he added, "We will continue to optimize our plan and begin to prepare for the 2021 World Robot Contest Finals in November."
The first prize certificate of the team
Besides the Baidu smart transportation team, SCNU also has six other teams at the School of Physics and Telecommunication Engineering making to the national finals of the competition, They were awarded the second prizes at the national level, and the first prize for Guangdong province.
A group photo of the seven teams awarded at the national level.
Eleven project groups were designed for the competition and nearly ten thousand students from 482 colleges and universities in China participated in the competition this year.
The guiding ideology of the National University Students Smart Car Race is to train more personnel, to encourage students to participate in it, to explore and be extraordinary. The race is an exploratory engineering practice facing the college students, with the complex assignment of designing a smart model vehicle, aiming at arousing students' potential and favor in engineering practice, scientific research and exploration.
See the list of awarded works: https://news.scnu.edu.cn/44464
Source from SCNU News Center
Translated by Zeng Yuetong
Proofread by Edwin Baak
Edited by Li Jianru
What to read next:
