Title: Autonomous Electric Race Car Design,
Abstract: Autonomous driving and electric vehicles are nowadays very active research
and development areas. In this paper we present the conversion of a standard
Kyburz eRod into an autonomous vehicle that can be operated in challenging
environments such as Swiss mountain passes. The overall hardware and software
architectures are described in detail with a special emphasis on the sensor
requirements for autonomous vehicles operating in partially structured
environments. Furthermore, the design process itself and the finalized system
architecture are presented. The work shows state of the art results in
localization and controls for self-driving high-performance electric vehicles.
Test results of the overall system are presented, which show the importance of
generalizable state estimation algorithms to handle a plethora of conditions.