Who Has the Best Self-driving Car? Northeastern Robotics Team Captures First Place in Premier Competition
A robotics team led by ECE Assistant Professor Milad Siami won the Self-Driving Car Competition at the American Control Conference (ACC) 2023. Participation in this competition puts students in the seat of a self-driving engineer applying skills related to image processing, machine learning, state estimation, vehicle speed and steering control and behaviour planning.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cyrus Moulton. Main photo: Courtesy photo
Successfully navigating roundabouts and obeying stop signs despite having no hands on the wheel, a team of Northeastern University robotics students won a self-driving car competition at the American Control Conference, a premier conference in robotics and automatic control.
The team included first-year students Kian Behzad and Rojin Zandi, rising second-year student Elehah Motamedi, and Dinesh Murugan, who is in the final year of a master’s program.
Milad Siami, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern and faculty adviser to the team, says that he was “immensely proud” of “truly exceptional students.”
“This victory is a shining example of our team’s intellect, effective collaboration, and their relentless passion for pushing boundaries in autonomous systems,” Siami says.
Northeastern beat out Purdue University, Arizona State University and the University of South Florida for the top prize.
“We had no idea what other teams were doing … so we were completely blinded,” says Behzad, the team leader. “So, we had to do it with everything we had so we didn’t have any regrets at the end.”
The concept of control means automation, or to make a system do what you mean it to do—to behave as you would like—without manual manipulation, Behzad explained.
The American Control Conference was a three-day event for the American Automatic Control Council, the U.S. national member organization of the International Federation for Automatic Control.
The annual event, which was held this year in San Diego, California, is sponsored by numerous professional engineering and scientific groups including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the International Society of Automation, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News