Elbflorace

Since 2006, the 60 motivated students who are part of Elbflorace have built a completely new car every year, advancing technologically with each season. After switching from combustion to electric vehicles in 2011, it was time to enter the field of autonomous driving in 2018.

The decision to use the 2017’s vehicle as the base system was made early on, as the car’s electrical setup proved to be reliable and adapting it to the new rules was not problematic. A single lidar sensor on the front wing is used for environment perception.

Joining the Formula Student Driverless competition for the first time, Elbflorace relies on dSPACE MicroAutoBox Embedded PC to connect the autonomous system with the vehicle’s sensors and processing units, to process the output of the environment sensors, and to perform state estimation.

Plans for coming seasons are already in the making. A GPU for image processing will be built into the vehicle and more lidars – useful for localization and mapping – are planned. The lidar-only setup will be complemented by additional cameras, which makes it possible to detect cones more easily.