Inspiration
The recent innovations in autonomous car technology excited us to discover and make our own form of lane tracking technology to guide cars with minimal resources – simply a dashboard camera.
What it does
By utilizing the OpenCV library and a camera, our program is able to track car lanes and give the necessary feedback to a car for either driving straight or slightly turning on curves in the road.
How we built it
Our goal was to utilize minimal resources, sure we could have used 20 lasers and 4 cameras on each side of the car… but that’s been done. We purposely limited ourselves to a single camera and one library to show that technology for the car doesn’t need to be as complicated as it seems or nearly as expensive.
Challenges we ran into
Since the math concepts and issues were part of the fun, we needed to ask mentors for help in linear algebra or we got creative with our solutions underneath the hood. One problem was making the turning work (based off the red lines) we were told that it was a form of complicated linear algebra, so we thought why find the intersection between groups of lines when one can get an average of the positive and negative correlation groups and intersect the average. This solution ended up fixing our problem.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
Well, we finished our goal! We were intimidated at first since autonomous cars are buzzing around in industry currently, and making a feature to help autonomous cars seemed difficult for a couple of first-year undergraduates. Honestly, we’re also surprised that we avoided that linear algebra still… that was a nightmare. What we learned We learned that with enough math, and a creative outlook, a lot of problems can be solved with a single sensor and smart coding. Of course having multiple sensors would help make our technology better; however, innovation occurs when one is limited in time and resource, that very philosophy allowed us to drive our project to completion.
What’s next for ADAS
We want to add car tracking to ADAS on our next revision to see incoming cars and check if they’re going straight or turning. This would be a safety feature to avoid issues such as drunk drivers or texters veering into the wrong lane. Eventually we want to make an autonomous vehicle with the technology; however, we want to solve problems one step at a time.
Built with:
OpenCV, C++
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