Autonomous Vehicle

As the mechanical engineering chief for Columbia University Robotics Club’s autonomous vehicle project, I’m tasked with building and maintaining two 1/10th scale autonomous vehicles. Below is an image of the first of two vehicles (the second is in the process of being built). While there is a standardized version of the F1Tenth vehicle, our first competition vehicle had to have several modifications made due to being originally built on a deprecated version of the competition standards. To modernize the car, a new depth-sensing camera mount had to be designed and 3D printed, the suspension had to be fixed and replaced, and the front bumper had to be replaced with a foam one. The LiDAR model also changed, requiring rewiring, placement optimization, and suspension tuning.

While the first car was built around an NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer board, the second car will be built with the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX in mind. Once it is completed, the first vehicle will be rebuilt with an NX board, allowing both vehicles to have the strong computing power necessary to process the LiDAR and image data during competitions.