Romanian Students Win Freescale Cup For Smart Car Project

Prague, Czech Republic: Students from the Technical University of Iasi, Romania, won the final round of the EMEA Freescale Cup Challenge, a competition where student teams build, program, and race an intelligent model car.

The teams were supplied with a model car kit including a servo motor for steering, two 7.2-V dc electric motors (one for each rear wheel), a Freescale analogue board for motor control, a battery and charger, a 1/18 scale chassis, an MC33931 H-Bridge, a CMOS camera for guidance, and a Freescale Qorriva MPC5604B automotive microcontroller to control the system.

The teams had to create motor control hardware and software to propel and steer their cars, working with a camera to guide the car along a black line marking the racetrack (see the figure). The racetrack consisted of speed bumps, an intersection, a hill, and zigzag curves.

Each car had to run its best lap time over two consecutive laps to be one of the 15 to make it to the final round. The SPARK team from the Technical University of Iasi, Romania, won the competition, finishing just ahead of Team 3.14 from the Slovak University of Technology and the team from Politechnika Wroclawska.

The Most Innovative award went to the Spektrum Research Group team from the Silesian University of Technology. In addition, the Faculty of Computer Science of the University Politehnica of Bucharest won the Best Introduction team video award, while the Best Uniform special award went to the PERSEUS team from Brno University of Technology.

The winning team will attend the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in San Antonio, Texas, to race against finalists from other regions.

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