From May 15 to May 17, Tianjin University’s unmanned driving team won two prizes at the Third World Intelligent Driving Challenge: an Excellence Award in the Country Off-road Race and a Lead Award in the Virtual Scene Race.

Professor Xie Hui from the Interdisciplinary Unmanned Vehicle Research Center in an interview with CCTV on May 15 said: “Competitors share the same goals in these competitions and the competition gives them an opportunity to exchange opinions and share their technology with each other. In this way they can meet the challenges in unmanned driving industrialization together.”

Tianjin University’s unmanned testing vehicle is equipped with an intelligent sensing system: SBW, a hyper-operation vehicle system and visual inspection system which consists of 64 lasers and 4 lasers, a millimeter-wave radar and INS. The vehicle has reached L4 and above. It has the function of auto-redirecting, breaking, accelerating, multi-target detecting and recognizing a real traffic scene, trajectory following and control. It is able to load environmental perception data and devise vehicle control strategy.

The Center also boasts virtual simulation software, intelligent control hardware, machine learning hardware, HIL, and campus testing platforms, in which Prescan and Scanner Studio are used.

A number of crossroads with traffic lights, barrier gates, lane lines and obstacle avoiding facilities were built at Tianjin University’s unmanned driving testing field which is also a demonstration field jointly constructed by Tianjin University, DTmobile and China Mobile. Open road testing of unmanned driving key technologies, backhaul of internet of vehicles, and the effect of green band can be performed in the field. Concurrently, unmanned road rollers catering for industrial applications has also been developed at the Center, which is part of intelligent manufacturing. The roller boasts core technologies such as precise trajectory control, intelligent obstacle avoiding, security control and malfunction diagnosing, among many others, and is now undergoing the verification for production pilot trials.

The World Intelligent Driving Challenge is part and parcel of the World Intelligence Congress, which consists of the Unmanned Driving Challenge, Information Security Challenge and Virtual Scene Challenge, and each challenge contains several competitions. The performance of the vehicles in terms of sensing, planning, decision making and control were tested in these challenges.

The Challenges attracted 84 teams from home and abroad. The Intelligent Driving Team of Tianjin University has taken part in the World Intelligent Driving Challenge for the third consecutive year, and has won the Lead Award in the Unmanned Driving Challenge in 2017 and four awards including the Excellence Award in the Off-road Race in 2018.

Tianjin University’s Intelligent Driving Team was supported by the University’s Interdisciplinary Unmanned Vehicle Research Center which is based on six disciplines—mechanical engineering, precision instruments, telecommunication, automation, computer science and math, and the studies of the research members vary from vehicle dynamics and image processing to machine learning and automation. It boasts technologies such as the sensing, decision-making and control algorithms for intelligent driving, among many others. With Academician Li Deyi as the chief scientist, the Center has over 20 professors, associate professors and lecturers and more than 60 doctoral and master students.

By: Wu Jingjing

Editors: Ross Colquhoun, Sun Xiaofang