newsletter October 2017
Stand and Events
Picture: Helge Rønning Birkelund
National convention for Fagforbundet In October, Revolve NTNU visited Fagforbundets fourth annual ordinary national meeting in Oslo. Three of our members drove from Trondheim to the capital with our newest racecar, Eld. At the event we were able to present our car to two of our sponsors, Fagforbundet and LO, and show them what they have contributed to. Revolve NTNU was also interviewed by Fagbladet and Klassekampen. The interviews can be found on their websites fagbladet.no and klassekampen.no. We also had a radio interview with Radioriks about our new projects.
Drivers
Driver team This year the tryouts for the driver positions were only open to Revolve members, mainly because they already have the required technical insight and dedication to the team. Prior to the tryouts, three of five driver positions had already been filled due to previous experience. Thus, only two positions remained. The candidates were evaluated based on an interview and a go-kart trial. The two candidates were chosen on the basis of their skill and motivation. This years driver team consists of the following members: Roberts RaÄ?ko, Thomas Frekhaug, Henrik Syrstad Moen, Truls Mentzoni Skoglund and Herbert Wikheim.
The drivers will be following a training regime that is meant to improve stamina and core strength. They also have to do mental exercises to improve their reaction time and stress management. To gain a better understanding of the car, they will attend lectures and technical meetings organized by other Revolve groups throughout the year. In order to develop their driving skills the drivers will practice on a customized simulator and on an outdoor go-kart track.
Driverless
Our RC-Car Those of us on the Driverless team at Revolve NTNU are hard at work developing perception, planning, and control algorithms for our soon to be driverless car, Eld. As systems begin to take shape, verifying and testing becomes increasingly important. In a perfect world, we could run our algorithms on Eld whenever we needed to test any system. In reality, test time with Eld is extremely limited thanks to a variety of factors - ongoing maintenance, retrofitting, as well as the harsh realities of norwegian winter to name a few. Computer simulation is great at illustrating how our systems work together, but to verify that they will work in the real world we need a physical, easy to use test platform which we can use indoors.
This is where our Traxxas XO-1 radio controlled car comes in. The car has a top speed of 160 km/h and accelerates from 0 to 100 in 2.3 seconds. It’s currently mounted with a ZED stereo camera, VectorNav INS, and a NVIDIA Jetson TX-1. The car had its maiden autonomous voyage yesterday, and as is often the case with first tries, we found plenty of issues to keep us busy going forward. Now that it’s up and running, we look forward to it keeping us company until things warm up and we can take Eld out to the test track again!
Driverless
Learning by doing As you probably know by now, we have established a new team, Revolve NTNU Driverless. They are supposed to make the car fram Team 2017, Eld, driverless for the Formula Student competitions during the summer of 2018. One of the groups working towards making Eld autonomous is the Vehicle group. Their latest project has been dismantling the car from 2016, Gnist. Eld has many of the same features as Gnist and therefore they can learn a lot by dismantling Gnist. They visualize how the mechanical parts are mounted to the car, learn about areas that are more troubling to work with and also learn
how to maintain the car. Maintaining the car is probably one of the hardest tasks apart from incorporating the design that will make the car autonomous. It is very important to know what might be wrong if the car wont start. This will save time and frustration in the future when it is time for testing the autonomous systems. Here you can see the car in pieces along with the few parts, such as brackets and engines, that we haven’t detached from the monocoque.
Mechanical
First deadline of our designs in CAD We started working on the different systems of our car in september. When we first started we needed to know what each system consisted of, how it worked and most importantly, what could be improved. After a few days of researching the different systems, we started working in CAD, Computer Aided Design. The program we use is called SolidWorks. The mechanical groups, Monocoque, Aerodynamics, Suspension and Accumulator and housing had there first deadline on october 20th. Here we saw all the mechanical systems together for the first time. Our technical leaders and Chief of CAD went through each and every design and gave feedback on what needed to be improved. Some of the problems encountered were bad placement of systems, not efficient use of designspace and designs that were underdefined. By having a first deadline so early in the process makes it easier to correct problems and add improvements. We have made many improvements from last year’s car, Eld, and we look forward to showcasing the result in May.
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