University of Waterloo
GM EcoCar 3

Autonomous Vehicle Software Team Member

The University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team competes in General Motors' annual EcoCAR 3 competition. The goal of the competition is to develop an electric autonomous vehicle from a base vehicle with bare parts provided by General Motors. Across the span of four years, teams work on building, assembling, wiring, and creating software for the vehicle, all from scratch.

On the team, I work on writing 'backend' software for the vehicle and developing simulations for the vehicle's motion and electrical componenet reponses. I program path finding algorithims using C++ in ROS (Robot Operating System), which I also use to perform sensor diagnostics and sensor fusion to our three radars and one lidar. I use MATLAB and Simulink to create visual and data simulations of our vehicle and its sensors at work in a real time environment to test for edge cases. I also work on processing and parsing CAN (Controller Area Network) data in order to code appropriate physical responses across many scenario such as lane change, turning, and emergency stops.

I have included documentation that we created that goes in depth into the use of integrated software and hardware towards our goal of achieving autonomous driving. You can read the pdf above if your interested! =)