car2go – Embracing autonomous driving at the Hackathon Stuttgart
With the upcoming of autonomous driving and electrical cars, we find ourselves at a turning point in how we can deal with the global traffic problem. We at car2go think free-floating car sharing will play a crucial part in the solution. Embracing that development will revolutionize how we can operate our fleet and meet the needs of our customers while creating a better environment for the future.
Did you ever find yourself wondering how an autonomous fleet of self-driving cars could work? So do we! Why don’t you participate and share your ideas for how we can prepare for this change?
car2go at Hackathon Stuttgart 2017
As a sponsor for this year’s Hackathon, we provide you with a collection of Waveshare AlphaBot2 robot cars and access to our APIs and technologies. Fleet management is a key element to successfully operate a stationless fleet with over 14.000 cars spreading from China to North America and Europe. This means, the operational status of every car has to be tracked in real-time.
You will get insights into how we accomplish this task. Equipped with the robots and our technologies, you can be among the first to create your own self-driving car sharing provider!
In order to communicate with its environment, the AlphaBot2 car comes with several programmable interfaces:
- infrared obstacle sensors,
- infrared line-tracking,
- WiFi-module,
- and a webcam,
all of which are connected to the heart of the robot, the Raspberry Pi 3. Your robot control algorithms can all be programmed very conveniently in Python. As the robot carries a real miniature computer, you can access the operating system and control its hardware via ssh over the network. For further reading, you can refer to the AlphaBot2-wiki.
You will be able to test the performance of your fleet on a real miniature map we provide you for the Hackathon Stuttgart.
We are excited about the ideas you will come up with and will assist you realizing them during the Hackthon Stuttgart!
