Goals and Solutions

Rotary Self-Driving Race Car Competition
 

Why Self Driving Race car project?

There are many Robotics programs tailored for pre-college students ranging from low $100s to high 1000s. Independently of the cost of the platforms, almost all existing robotics competitions for high school students require the students to focus on building and integrating the hardware that makes up the robot, at the expense of designing and training intelligent Robots. Our goal is to create a program to teach Deep Learning or training of Neural Network to experiment with self-drive technology for high schools students. This program focuses mainly on robotics software but does provide some degree of hardware interaction. Students are given a hardware kit that includes the camera, PWM controller and Raspberry PI. The whole sensing and computation platform is fitted on 1/8 to 1/16 scale race cars, making it an exciting platform for students.

Students build their skills over the first 6 months putting the car together and then spending time training the car on a test race track they create. Since each high school will be given one such car kit per four-five students hence the high school might have a local competition with teams to find their champion.

To keep the high school students engaged in this activity and to measure their success it’s important to host an annual Rotary SDRC Competition for high school teams across the bay area along with Rotary Club of San Jose East/Evergreen sponsored teams for under-represented demographics in tech and the underprivileged students especially from the ESUHSD. 

Goals

Hence our goal is to foster Deep Learning, Neural Network, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics concepts among high school students in the bay area high schools, and to encourage underrepresented and underprivileged demographics into STEM fields especially into Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Deep Learning. The solution is scalable and we would like to raise enough funds to continue this competition for a long time.

Solution

There will be two separate efforts to get this project running. One is to establish the Rotary SDRC Competition and another to set up the club sponsored teams in the ESUHSD high schools.