I could not have asked for a better end to 2024 as I represented Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, at the 22nd F1Tenth Autonomous Grand Prix 2024 which took place in Milan, Italy, at the Allianz MiCo - Milano Convention Centre from 16 to 19 December.
This was held alongside the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Controls. We competed against extremely professional teams from Hungary 🇭🇺, Austria 🇦🇺, Switzerland 🇨🇭, South Korea 🇰🇷, Italy 🇮🇹, and Germany 🇩🇪.
I was fortunate to be part of the on-site team alongside my highly skilled teammates: Parth Agrawal, Yash Gupta, Kshitij Vaidya, Yajan Agarwal, Shivam Singh Yadav, Sahil Kukreja, and Paawan Nenwani. Months of relentless efforts by the entire team made it possible for us to compete at the prestigious event. As one of the few undergraduate teams at the event, it was a great learning experience.
The competition consisted of two categories -
1 - Time trial: where the objective was to complete the maximum number of laps within a given timeframe.
2 - Head-to-head racing: where two autonomous cars compete directly on the same track. In this division, the focus was on the car's ability to overtake, avoid collisions, and strategically navigate the track to outpace the opponent while adhering to the competition's rules.
As a Perception Engineer, my task was to perform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) on the car, which I did using Google's highly versatile Cartographer SLAM package.
The conference exhibits were truly inspiring, especially the insightful conversations with the team from Politecnico di Milano on their autonomous Maseratis. Equally impressive were the innovations from other remarkable companies working on autonomous scooters, drones, and a variety of cutting-edge technologies.
A big thanks to the Unmesh Mashruwala Innovation Cell | IIT Bombay for making this possible, our faculty advisor - Professor Archak Mittal for his guidance, and Professor Rahul Mangharam for his help in obtaining the car.
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