German students from the University of Bayreuth work together within the scope of the non-profit organization Elefant Racing, a Formula Student Team. To improve the reliability of the developed autonomous system and their chances of winning the competition, they’ve reached out to Dutch company marXact to help them with creating geodata faster and more accurately than before by sponsoring a UNI-GR1 GNSS receiver.
A fast student racing team
Elefant Racing is an independent student-run organization with an educational purpose. Each year a new team of about 70 students from all different majors design, manufacture, and test an own developed new single-seat formula racecar. It started back in 2004 with combustion engines, as of 2011, the car is electrically powered. For the car of 2021, the team implements a fully autonomous system.
In the summer months, they compete at various Formula Student Events on the most famous Formula One Racetracks worldwide against other student teams. The project is about learning, building friendships and to inspire others to innovate.
Accurate results
Part of the driverless competition is to perform different static and dynamic disciplines. The dynamic events require to stay on a track marked by cones. The UNI-GR1 helps the team to improve the algorithms quality by measuring the difference between ground truth data, provided by the UNI-GR1, and the estimation of the cone position.
Jeroen Methorst, Marketing Executive at marXact: “Our UNI-GR1 makes use of satellite signals to create a centimetre accurate point or line. In this case, it is the position of a cone or other obstacles. That data is stored in a personal data cloud in real time, which allows for immediate review and -if necessary-, the team can make changes on the spot.”
The UNI-GR1 has an essential impact on the success of the project as its data represents the benchmark for the cone pose estimation system. Elefant Racing is able to measure the improvements with each iteration.
Coming on board
Methorst: “Elefant Racing represents the University of Bayreuth, which is close to our heart here at marXact. We strongly believe in the power of education and developing yourself, and helping others do so too. So when we were contacted by this team and spoke with them over Teams, it was a no-brainer. Our UNI-GR1 receiver provides Elefant Racing with the necessary data they need in order to give them that edge to stand-out from the competition.
And honestly, using our products for a competition like this, is just really cool, isn’t it? ‘
