civil engineering doctoral students yang woo kim and gihyeob an computer science senior steven leal and mechanical engineering senior brianne murray have worked alongside more than 40 students from six departments within the texas a&m college of engineering to get the car ready for the spring 2018 competition ive always had an interest in autonomous vehicles kim said i have a background in image processing and computer coding and have worked in the electronics industry previously so i was excited to get the opportunity to work on this project the aggie team was split into 10 sub teams each assigned with a different task for the overall project kim and leal work with the lane detection team coding the car with the ability to detect lanes and other objects from its birds eye view camera ans work involves getting the car from one point to another creating a waypoint for the vehicle to follow as it moves from destination to destination while following a trajectory as theyve completed their tasks the team members have branched out to other groups within the overall team helping with heat exchange and design murray started as part of the longitudinal control team developing code and mechanics to help the car move forward and brake before assisting the lane detection team leal was assigned to the simulation team creating a simulated vehicle that the team could use to virtually test their ideas for the actual car we had a lot of people with the technical know-how to create control algorithms because they have taken these classes and they could whip them up in matlab and show a really nice graph but we needed to implement it into an environment that could work specifically on our server hardware that was running inside of the vehicle leal said that transition required someone with the technical know-how between different programming languages i think for any senior design project youre never really prepared and you learn most while youre in the project trying to collect data and scope murray said throughout the last two semesters murray said she has gained new skills in communication and project management and overall it has been a valuable experience were trying to figure out where we fit in on the scope of things how big is our project on the scale of things and how can we be leaders and encourage each other while also being present with the bigger group she said leal said that the project brought many challenges to the team its surprising at the end of this that each individual part of the project such as object detection seems simple enough however communicating each set of data to a waypoint planner and then having the waypoint planner correctly send data over to the control teams it starts to become a really complex problem leal said in arizona the car will be hooked up to gms testing hardware so they can record data as they perform goals within the test once the team gets on site there will be three tests performed first the car will have to pass a straight line test where it will go down a single lane and stop each time it approaches a stop sign the second test will be the lateral challenge where the car has to navigate through a curvy one lane road and stop at the end the final test is the object detection or lane change challenge the students look forward to the competition as not only a way to showcase their skills but as a way to identify areas for the vehicles improvement and development i think this competition is a good opportunity for students to run actual skills an said challenges like this are what help students apply their knowledge and gain practical understanding and i am glad to be a part of it all students have been led and supported by faculty members across the texas a&m college of engineering including: zachry department of civil engineering:dr alireza talebpour – associate professor and project leader department of computer science and engineering:dr dezhen song – professor department of electrical and computer engineering:dr peng li - professor department of mechanical engineering:dr debiyoti banerjee - professor dr swaroop darbha - professordr swaminathan gopalswamy - professor of practice dr sivakumar rathinam - associate professor