Driverless Design Event – How to prepare?

Posted by on July 16, 2019

The Driverless Design officials have created a guide for the DV teams to help you get ready for the event.  (;

Read more for the details!

At Formula Student East there will be only one combined Engineering Design Event for the Driverless teams, the “base” vehicle and the autonomous system will be judged at the same place and the same time. We use the name “Driverless Design Event” for this event, the maximum achievable score is 300 pts, which will be not divided into “base” and autonomous parts.

Our aim was to combine the topics. There will be judges whose responsibility will be more or less the same as the “normal” Engineering Design Event (e.g. Powertrain), but there will be topics where the base vehicle judgment is supplemented with autonomous specific parts (e.g. Suspension & Actuators)

There will be separate judges for some „pure” autonomous topics (e.g. Machine Vision).

The planned judging topics of the 9 judges are the following:

  • Overall Driverless Vehicle Concept & Management
  • Chassis & Aerodynamics & Sensor Mounting
  • Suspension & Actuators
  • Powertrain
  • Electronic system & SW architecture & Signal Processing
  • Machine Vision
  • Motion Planning
  • Trajectory Tracking
  • Autonomous Safety

The optimal would be the same number of team member for the given topics.

The judges will ask mainly about their own topic, but because judges are very curious :), they can ask outside of their own topic and it is a beneficial if the actual team member can give an answer for a general question regarding to other parts of the car. If the question is deeper than that, the team member can politely point out that this topic is related to another team member, and show the judge this person.

The Driverless Design Event will take place in the pit of the team, the time frame is 55 min, starts at the beginning of your time slot defined in the Static Event Schedule. Please be prepared because the judges will leave your pit after 55 min.

The 55 min starts with ~5 min introduction, which includes the team and vehicle concept introduction and also the introduction of the Design Judge group. The teams will have ~50 min discussion time.

After a short evaluation of your performance, the judges will give you a feedback in ~5 min.

Please prepare your printed documentation to substantiate your design decision and arguments. Showing videos of simulations, real-life tests and visualizations of the vision system, mapping and trajectory tracking are permitted (and advised) on laptops or tablets.

We wish you a successful preparation for the competition! (;

The event is organized by the Engineers for the Automotive Higher Education Associasion