Autonomous driving with the Raspberry Pi: University team builds self-driving racing car

Surprising emergency stops or ghost braking on the highway, misread traffic signs and advertising posters that are interpreted as road scenes. The reports about assistance systems currently in use on our roads are sometimes amusing or sometimes hair-raising.

You might think that it would work just as well or even better with a home-made system. It cannot be ruled out that the Ampere team from the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil had the same idea.

The Formula SAE Brazil racing series gives students the opportunity to pit self-developed electric and fuel cell-powered vehicles against each other on the circuit. Experienced engineers and developers are on hand to help them further optimize the technology and identify errors.

A category with self-driving racing cars has been included since 2023. And the first vehicle to take part in the competition was the AMP-223 prototype.

Its control center is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The single-board computer was introduced back in 2016 and can still be purchased from Amazon, among others.

The Luxonis OAK D-W, a wide-angle camera that has its own circuit board and helps to detect objects, is used to monitor the route.

Admittedly: Completing the route here was much easier than getting through the Lexington city traffic. Blue and yellow cones mark the boundaries of the route. The software uses these to draw the route, for which the optimum driving behavior is then determined. So the whole thing is challenging, albeit without other road users or misleading advertising signs.

But there is hope for the future if a team of students can use an old Raspberry Pi to independently steer an electric racing car around a test course. Perhaps the Raspberry Pi 5 will then be enough to at least catch up with current autopilots.

The video shows how the autonomous racing car completes its first lap: