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January 2021
 


January Workshop


Path Planning


What is the BPP?

Mathias Lien
Uprights for Suspension & Powertrain
 
A new year and a new semester have begun, and it's time for the January Workshop at Revolve. This time last year, our offices were packed with team members starting in-house production and production planning, but also ramping up preparations for the competition’s quizzes in February.  

However, in 2021, the offices are empty. Norway is again in a lockdown period due to the COVID pandemic and we are all working from home. This requires quite an adjustment for the team, making all communication, lectures, and work to proceed on digital platforms. Though it makes the process harder, all members are as motivated as ever to keep up the good work.

In January we are beginning production. Mechanical and electrical designs are refined and thoroughly checked for flaws or collisions with other systems before the team starts to focus on machine drawings and other preparations for production. To produce a race car in 4 months, a lot of time needs to be put into preparations and production planning. This time of year, we call our partners on a near-daily basis to make sure we have a good understanding of the complex parts to be made, and processes to be completed. As appointments have been set with many of our partners, they are ready for the production of the many different parts that in the end will become a complete race car.

Design preparation and production are not the only things we do during the January Workshop. With several hundred Formula Student teams registered around the world, the competition for slots at the competitions is hard. For the EV class, most competitions have around 30-40 slots, and for DV some only have 10! The team has to be prepared and get excellent results in the competition quiz to qualify for the competitions. During January we continue to practice the quiz as we did in the fall semester, reading up on competition rules, applied physics and engineering. Everyone has to be fit to fight, in order for us to achieve our goal of qualifying for all the competition slots we want for the summer!

This is a hectic time of the year and all members are hard at work to reach deadlines in this crucial time in the project. All things considered, we are in good spirits and looking forward to seeing the results of our efforts unfold throughout the spring!
 
Update: At the time of publishing, we've gained limited access to our office and workshop. The capacity of people allowed to be there at the same time has been reduced, but hopefully, soon, we'll all be able to work there together again.

Jørgen Rosager
Group Leader for Autonomous
For an autonomous robot to be truly autonomous it needs to be able to move itself throughout its operating environment without any human assistance. The path planning problem is the essence of this: How can the robot find the optimal path between one point and another?

This problem is perhaps one of the most researched problems in AI, with lots of well known algorithms like A*, D*, RRT and more. While all of these are good solutions we want to focus on a specific solution; Particle filters. This is the solution Revolve Driverless NTNU has developed inhouse over the past two years for solving the path planning problem presented in Formula Student Driverless (FSD).

The path planning problem in FSD is finding a way to navigate the track, which consists of blue and yellow cones on each side. While this problem might seem trivial for a human, we have realized that it is not that simple for a computer, especially in difficult situations like hairpin turns and tight corners. There is also no such thing as perfect information when talking about the real world. The input to path planning might not include all the cones, it might have too many cones, the position of the cones can be slightly off etc. A solution for the path planning problem must take these into account. It must be robust, but it also must be able to plan far ahead so that the car can drive at sufficient pace to reach our goals.
 
This was an excerpt from the article in the autumn issue of our magazine. Read the full article in the digital version of our magazine!
 
Revolve Magazine Autumn Issue

Mia Elisenberg
Marketing Member for Marketing
The BPP stands for the Business Plan Presentation and it’s part of the static events at the Formula Student competitions, in addition to the Cost & Manufacturing event and Engineering Design event. This event is all about selling the car. One is tasked with presenting the car for a set of judges roleplaying as fictitious investors, and the team able to sell the fictitious product the best wins.

A full score in BPP gives 75 points, which is more than a full score in the dynamic events – Skidpad (71.5 points) and Acceleration (71.5 points) respectively. This shows how important it is to not just be able to drive the car but also sell it.

The team has been working diligently throughout the autumn semester in order to have a first draft of the BPP ready to be presented this month. Our headstart has made us able to get a good grip of what it takes to be a winning BPP team and we will continue to work towards achieving top performing results this year and in the future.
 
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