(left) 19 year old Romanian high school student develops a low cost self-driving car technology (Right) that may soon make a standard self-driving feature feasible for automakers. (Pics via Ionut Budisteanu, MSN, and Azcentral.com)
Shortly after hosting the college oriented Cornell Cup Engineering competition, Intel was back at it this past weekend as the host of the world’s largest high school science research competition - the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held in Phoenix. The event drew in approximately 1600 high school whiz kids to compete for top cash prizes from more than 70 countries worldwide. Ionut Budisteanu of Romania claimed this year’s top prize for the development of an economically feasible self-driving car technology. Honorable mentions include Young Scientist Award winners Eesha Khare and Henry Lin who both received prizes of $50,000 for their respective tech innovations - a 20-30s battery charging supercapacitor for small electronic devices, and a highly useful galaxy cluster simulator.
The nineteen year old Ionut set out to develop a technology that would make Google’s recent self-driving car realizable for present-day auto manufacturers. Ionut took the approach of replacing the most expensive part of the self-driving car technology - the high-resolution 3D radar - with a lower resolution device that would perform just as well. His work also addresses the global issue of driver-error related vehicle deaths, currently hovering just above 2 million victims per year.
Ionut’s system collects information from the radar on a moving vehicle and processes it in real time. This data is handled by a series of computers that calculate the vehicle’s path through recognition of various large objects along the road. The Romanian high school student performed 50 simulations - 47 of these worked to perfection, while the remaining three failed to recognize people standing 65-100 feet from the vehicle.
By implementing a 3D radar with a bit more resolution, Ionut predicts his system will cost around $4000 to make - a huge markdown from Google’s $75,000 method. This of course means that auto manufacturers will be able to squeeze the novel tech into their vehicle development budgets sooner rather than later. And, aside from his $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award from Intel’s event, Ionut has received funding from a Romanian company to begin testing out prototypes of his system this coming summer. Self-driving tech may soon be commonplace in the personal transportation industry, and at the production cost this young high school student has achieved, may even become a higher end DIY project for auto enthusiasts.
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