FORMUL A STUDENT DRIVERLESS TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS

Conversion of a Manually
Driven Racing Car
to a Driverless Vehicle

© Infinity Racing – AUTHORS

racing team at
Kempten University e.V.

Lukas Twerdy, B. Eng.

is head of actuators department
in the Infinity Racing Team at
Kempten UAS (Germany).
The Infinity Racing – racing team at Kempten University e.V. has
been constructing combustion engine powered racing cars for
10 years. For the 2018 season, the team decided to convert the
base vehicle to participate in the Driverless competition. Additional
sensors, actuators, batteries and control units were integrated into
the vehicle as part of the autonomous system to enable the navigation Felix Müller, B. Eng.
is head of electronics department
of a previously unknown course marked by traffic cones. in the Infinity Racing Team at
Kempten UAS (Germany).

ENERGY SUPPLY with 400 W of power, the braking sys-

The core of a technically robust overall
system is the reliable supply of energy to
all additional components. Compared to
an electric vehicle, this created addi-
tional effort for our combustion engine
powered vehicle, since it only possessed
a 12 V electrical system with low battery
capacity and an alternator that only just
managed to supply the previous manual
system. In terms of energy, the most rele-
vant additionally installed components
are the steering motor, a 48 V DC motor
tem MK100 with a power requirement Manuel Koch, B. Sc.
of approximately 600 W at 12 V DC with is technical director of
high peak currents. Based on the largest the Infinity Racing Team
at Kempten UAS (Germany).
consumers, a final decision was made to
integrate an additional 48 V DC electrical
system since the 12 V/48 V DC/DC con-
verter proved itself to be problematic in
this power range. To achieve this, sev-
eral lithium-iron phosphate batteries
were used that had a high capacity and
Robert Böhler, M. Sc.
low physical volume, and which were
is team leader of the
not prone to thermal runaway (1). The Infinity Racing Team at
existing 12 V electrical network was Kempten UAS (Germany).

66
also extended by more powerful batter-
ies. Flat cells were selected for this that
possessed above-average high capacity
for their physical size. This configuration
now offered sufficient capacity to be able
to supply the autonomous system.
ENGINE CONTROL
The control of the combustion engine
proved to pose a particular challenge.
The engine control unit, Bosch Motor-
sport MS4, was already mounted in the
vehicle. Since control of the accelerator
pedal was achieved via a manual throt-
tle with cable, changes had to be made.
A decision was made to implement a
Bosch electronic throttle which was
calibrated in the engine control unit.
In order to enable engine control via
software, an electronic board was deve-
loped that used a microcontroller and a
digital/analog converter to provide the
required APPS signal (Acceleration Pedal
Position Sensor) in a redundant fashion.
To do this, the microcontroller receives
the demand and feedback values from
the CAN bus and controls the throttle
until the desired value is reached.
A further challenge arose from the
requirement to shift gears and work the
clutch automatically. A pneumatic system
was used to do this that employed several
actuators to operate the clutch and shift
levers on the transmission. This is also
controlled via CAN bus. An idle sensor is
also mounted, optically symbolized by
an LED, that shows when the vehicle is
in neutral gear and hence there is no dan-
ger of undesired vehicle starts.
every 100 ms to maintain the logic con-
trol that signals the monitoring is active.
If the signal fails, the EBS is triggered.
STEERING SYSTEM
This season saw a lot of attention being
focused on the reworking of the steering
system in terms of the actuators. Parti-
cular emphasis was placed on a robust
and low friction design and on a power-
ful motor that could withstand dynamic
maneuvering and yet continue to be
suitable for manual driving.
The Formula Student rulebook in
particular presented severe limitations
in terms of the positioning of the compo-
nents, since there had to be sufficient
room for a driver in the car who had to
be able to operate all vehicle systems
without restriction. Above all, the imple-
mentation of the 48 V power supply was
not definite during the planning stage;
something which resulted as a prerequi-
site for a drive motor.
Other requirements resulted from the
measurement of the required torques,
both when stationary and when travel-
ling. The torque for the motor was calcu-
lated using this data and considering the
efficiencies of all connecting elements.
A 48 V Nema 34 Smartmotor was selected
(T = 1.23 Nm; Tpeak = 3.93 Nm) with an
integrated motor driver and programma-
ble controller. This enables closed
loop control of the steering angle to be
achieved directly by the motor with the
aid of two linear potentiometers on the
transverse link. Since the existing steer-
ing was under a lot of tension, all steering
components had been gradually replaced
over the course of the season and several
parts were completely overhauled. In par-
allel, we developed different concepts
whose degree of maturity increased over
time, as shown in FIGURE 1.
The final version consisted of a 1:1
bevel gearbox that ensured the transfer
of torque via keys from the horizontal
motor shaft to the vertical steering col-
umn. The components under load are
made of stainless steel and all moving
parts are suspended using bearings
without play and with low friction. The
optimal transfer of the bevel gear teeth
is adjusted exactly using shim rings.
The gearbox construction is connected
via two specially manufactured and
hardened cardan couplings and a con-
nection shaft to the motor gearbox. The

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEM
MANAGEMENT UNIT (AMU)

Since our autonomous system consists

of many different sensors, switches and
displays, a dedicated monitoring board
was developed for the system – the
Autonomous System Management Unit
(AMU). The board consists of an Atmel
microcontroller that can be programmed
in C. It handles the control and manage-
ment of the vehicle status: off, active,
driving, emergency or finished. The sig-
nal is displayed accordingly. The AMU
also handles the monitoring of the emer-
gency braking system (EBS). The AMU
can also trigger the EBS via an error flag.
In addition, there is a so-called watch- FIGURE 1 First concept (1), optimized (2) and final version (3) of the complete
dog on the AMU that sends a high signal steering construction (© Infinity Racing – racing team at Kempten University e.V.)

December 2018 Formula Student Germany 67

FORMUL A STUDENT DRIVERLESS TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS

– Brake piston front brake Brake piston rear brake

Minimum pressure 50 bar = 5 N/mm 2 25 bar = 2.5 N/mm2

Piston surface area A1&2 = π ∙ (9.53 mm)2 = 285.32 mm2

Minimum force
N N
on the individual F1 = 5 _____ ∙ 285.32 mm2 = 1426.61 N F2 = 2,5 _____ ∙ 285.32 mm2 = 716.30 N
mm 2 mm 2
pistons
TABLE 1 Calculation of forces during an emergency
Total piston force Fges = F1 + F2 = 1426.61 N + 716.30 N = 2142.91 N brake manoeuvre (© Infinity Racing – racing team
at Kempten University e.V.)

key joints are designed for the maxi-
mum torque of the motor (including
gearbox: 95 Nm) and calculated with
a static shear stress analysis with a
safety factor of 1.35.
EMERGENCY BRAKE SYSTEM (EBS)
An Emergency Brake System (EBS)
was stipulated at the start of the
Formula Student Driverless premier
event in the summer of 2017 that
had to trigger a braking manoeuvre
with a negative acceleration of 8 m/s²
within 200 ms of a system fault or
as a consequence of the emergency
stop button being activated in order
to bring the vehicle to a standstill.
The rulebook specifies strict condi-
tions concerning its functioning and
control. The requirements and the
failure probability were tightened in
the 2018 season and only passive sys-
tems with mechanical energy storage
were permitted that even had to be
safeguarded via redundancy.
FIGURE 2 Forces acting on the brake pedal
(© Infinity Racing – racing team at Kempten University e.V.)
68
A range of approaches were analyzed
in the conceptual stage: from hydraulic
storage, additional main brake cylinders
connected via pneumatic actuators, to
a pre-tensioned, sprung brake pedal.
The evaluation of measurements on
the installed brake pressure sensors
resulted in a minimum brake pressure
of 50 bar at the front and 25 bar at the
rear. This were used to calculate the lay-
out of the emergency brake system for
full braking, TABLE 1.
Since the brake pedal is designed for
2000 N and the minimum force is in
the order of 740 N, a pneumatic cylinder
was chosen with piston diameter of
63 mm and 50 mm displacement that
can pull 1750 N at 6 bar. This is applied
directly via a Bowden cable to the upper-
most leverage point of the brake pedal,
FIGURE 2. This has the effect that the
placement of additional components is
flexible; the high forces remain in their
subsystems and only a low pressure of
6 bar is required. Compared to the force
created by a driver’s leg, the 1750 N
produced by the EBS is very substan-
tial. A high-pressure store was not
used to increase practicability. Instead,
a 2 l pressure tank was used (colored
green in the title figure) that can be
filled up to 16 bar via a car tyre valve
and a high-pressure hand pump or com-
pressor. The purely mechanical system
is triggered via a 5/2-way magnetic valve
that switches when the voltage drops.
The FS rulebook specifies special regula-
tions for the electronic logic circuit used
to control the EBS. This logic circuit
was implemented in the self-developed
board in the Autonomous System Man-
agement Unit, whereby the mounted
microcontroller is the supervisor of the
EBS system.
ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION
FOR CONE RECOGNITION
A high precision camera from the
company IDS was used as a sensor
to capture the environment, which
is used in industrial and automotive
applications. Care must be taken to
ensure that the vibrations excited by
the combustion engine are not trans-
mitted via the camera mount to the
camera image. In addition, the camera
must not protrude above the area pro-
tected by the roll-cage. Since the cam-
era was already waterproof according
to IP68, no camera housing was needed,
FIGURE 3. Dampers were used to reduce
vibration whose design took the weight
of the camera and lens into account.
These are also used in model Quadcopters.
The RGB image transmitted by the
camera via Ethernet is then further
processed by the central processor, an
Odroid XU4 single board computer with
ARM processor and Ubuntu operating
system. Compared to almost all the other
teams, we did not use inductive models
such as neural networks for recognition.
With sufficient training data, Convolu-
FIGURE 3 Camera with mounting and attachment at the vehicle frame (© Uli Regenscheit)

FIGURE 4 Original mono camera image (left), binary image (middle), processed image (right)
(© Infinity Racing – racing team at Kempten University e.V.)

tional Neural Networks (CNNs) can

deliver good results for object recogni-
tion in many cases, however, a disadvan- THANKS
tage is that the results are not determin-
The authors would like to thank co-author Maximil-
istic. In particular, false detections can-
ian Bernotat, who was active in the actuators
not be traced back to determine their
department in the 2018 season and will be support-
cause [1]. Our approach to recognize
ing the team as head of actuators department in the
the differently colored cones is based
coming season.
on morphological and segmented image
processing algorithms. As an example,
the figure shows the remaining binary
image after segmentation and the classi-
fied twin areas of the cone, FIGURE 4.

REFERENCES
[1] Winner, H.: Handbuch Fahrerassistenzsys-
teme. Springer Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 2015
[2] Rao, M. C.: Novel Cathode Materials for
Rechargeable Batteries. International Journal
of Science and Research (IJSR), 2013, ISSN
Online: 2319-7064, Impact Factor: 4.438

December 2018 Formula Student Germany 69