Autonomous Vehicle Hackerspace Championship
The idea with this project is to let people participate with their own robots / rc cars and other autonomous vehicles in a championship.
The idea started with Vegard Paulsen being inspired from the annual Sparkfun AVC challenge in USA. He will lead and help to form this contest into a Hackerspace event. Everyone interested can help out! The event will take place in Oslo, Norway sometime in 2011!
AVHC Rules (Work in progress)
The basic rule of the contest is that your vehicle has to be able to go from the start line of the planned course to the finish line all by itself. No human intervention is allowed.
The course will be outside so gps and every other microcontroller, electronic chip or sensor that may help it along the way is allowed, but no radio controlled devices or any form of human control that can help the vehicles will be alloved. (wireless telemetry to view the vehicles data may still be allowed).
There will be setup obstacles on the course (Probably large barrels or cones) that must be avoided and possibly some other stuff.
*If the vehicle get stuck on something and goes to a standstill for 1 minute it will be disqualified from the round. (so we don't wait forever on a stuck vehicle).
*No human intervention! No controllers people!
*Every vehicle must have a kill switch that kills all power! (In case things don't go as planned).
*The championchip course will be announced before the event so its possible for people to get some gps waypoints and other info.
*Hackerspace is not responsible for any destroyed vehicles and cannot in any form be blamed if your entry gets destroyed somehow. Enter at your own risk (and wallet).
*There will be several rounds and maybe several classes like ground / air if the interest grows.
*Every vehicle will start of seperatly and will finish atleast 1 round to be able to be in the contest.
*there will be a final round. Best overall times win.
*after individual round championchip is completed there will be a Superchampionchip where every participant can line up at the startline at the same time and the first vehicle that passes the finishline wins.
*A jury will be judging the championship and might demand checking the contestants entrys if there is doubt of cheating. You might be asked to show of your vehicle hardware & software to the judge.
Awards / prices
there will be prices for:
*best individual round *winner of superchampionship *Best cosmetic design award *Funnyest vehicle award *The avhc FAIL award *Best crash award *best idea
And probably some more awards as people starts spinning their heads around.
General info
You can participate as either one person, or as a team. Each team may have a maximum number of 2 persons.
If you want to compete with teams >2, you can, but you will have to compete in a separate team class (to make it fair to the smaller teams).
So. What happens during the Championchip?
First your entry vehicle will drive 1 round.
Then you will have some time off until your next round (you are alloved to repair your vehicle between rounds, or go watch your competitors).
The time you get from the first round will be added to the 2 round and so on. There will be 3 rounds.
Best time wins the championchip.
If you are only able to participate in some of the rounds because of vehicle problems or round disqualification (stuck vehicle), a jury will decide what to do.
Then the Superchampionchip starts. There will be 1 super-round where every contestant/team that wants will be able to compete by running at the same time. Winner is first over the finnishline. (This might get messy!).
Rules & conditions will change alot during the planning process!
Please edit the wiki as you wish if you have anything to say!
Sounds interesting?
Sign up on the hackerspace oslo mailinglist if you havent allready to be a part of this challenge!
- Sign up to the Hackerspace mailinglist for more information.
- Join our IRC channel: #oslohackerspace at freenode to chat with us.
Don't know where to start?
This might help some. All you basically need is to learn a bit of microcontrollers and start hack away at your electric rc car.
One approach can be checking out the Ardupilot UAV microcontroller to get you going! For more information about programming check
Arduino.cc and DO CHECK the forums on Diydrones.com for other people doing the excactly same ting to their rc cars!
Some videos from the sparkfun competition to get you going!
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