newsletter June 2019
Testing Period Text: Karoline Halvorsen Photos: Revolve NTNU
After 8 months of building Nova we are finally in the testing season. Our goal is simple: Push Nova to the limits and train our drivers to perform at their absolute best. Unfortunately, we have had some delays due to missing parts on Nova, our electric vehicle, and we have decided not to go to FSEast, the competition in Hungary. This gives us more testing time in Norway, before going to the FSA in Austria. Here in Trondheim we are having some great testing days. Besides the weather, there is nothing to complain about. An ordinary day during the testing period is to arrive at the workshop at 9:00, starting the day with a debrief. Here the members from the night shift brief the members of the day shift on what has been done during the last few hours, what needs to be done, and the challenges. Then the day shift takes the car out to VĂŚrnes, about 40 minutes from our workshop, to drive as much as possible.
These last few weeks, we have tuned Torque Vectoring and Power Limiting, trained on Skid pad and tested field weakening on our motors. After a day on the track, we are heading home to meet the night shift for the next briefing. After discussing our problems and tasks for the night and goals for the next day, the day shift goes home and the night shift starts working, trying to get the car as ready as possible, before a new day of testing starts!
Driving a Driverless Car Text: Ola Kirkerud Photos: Revolve NTNU
For the past 8 months our autonomous engineers have created a brand new driverless pipeline, new PCBs, a steering actuator, a processing unit and reliable safety systems. For the past month we have been testing to make sure all components work properly together. Atmos has been through a high speed shakedown where our test driver Jostein, has pushed the car to 10 000 rpm at 12 Nm torque. During testing of Atmos we have recorded sensor data. This has given us the opportunity to tune, test and validate the driverless pipeline with real data. The new autonomous hardware is integrated and functions reliably. The emergency break creates a break power of more than 120 bar, equivalent to 122.36 kg/cm^2.
In the days ahead our main focus will be on software tuning, but also doing some improvements on the hardware. The competitions are not so far away, but our goal of driving autonomously at 10m/s is still within our reach.
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