university+students
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Team KAT Wins the Autonomous Car Challenge
(Team KAT receiving the Presidential Award)
A KAIST team won the 2018 International Autonomous Car Challenge for University Students held in Daegu on November 2.
Professor Seung-Hyun Kong from the ChoChunShik Graduate School of Green Transportation and his team participated in this contest with the team named KAT (KAIST Autonomous Technologies). The team received the Presidential Award with a fifty million won cash prize and an opportunity for a field trip abroad.
The competition was conducted on actual roads with Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAV), which incorporate autonomous driving technologies and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication system.
In this contest, the autonomous vehicles were given a mission to pick up passengers or parcels. Through the V2X communication, the contest gave current location of the passengers or parcels, their destination, and service profitability according to distance and level of service difficulty.
The participating vehicles had to be equipped very accurate and robust navigation system since they had to drive on narrow roads as well as go through tunnels where GPS was not available. Moreover, they had to use camera-based recognition technology that was invulnerable to backlight as the contest was in the late afternoon.
The contest scored the mission in the following way: the vehicles get points if they pick up passengers and safely drop them off at their destination; on the other hand, points are deducted when they violate lanes or traffic lights. It will be a major black mark if a participant sitting in the driver’s seat needs to get involved in driving due to a technical issue.
Youngbo Shim of KAT said, “We believe that we got major points for technical superiority in autonomous driving and our algorithm for passenger selection.”
This contest, hosted by Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, was the first international competition for autonomous driving on actual roads. A total of nine teams participated in the final contest, four domestic teams and five teams allied with overseas universities such as Tsinghua University, Waseda University, and Nanyang Technological University.
Professor Kong said, “There is still a long way to go for fully autonomous vehicles that drive flexibly under congested traffic conditions. However, we will continue to our research in order to achieve high-quality autonomous driving technology.”
(Team KAT getting ready for the challenge)
2018.11.06 View 9436 -
3rd Ubiquitous Fashionable Computer Contest
KAIST will be receiving until May 31, Thursday, applications for ‘the 3rd Ubiquitous Fashionable Computer (UFC)’ Contest, which will take place under the title of ‘Enjoy U-life with UFC’.
The contest has begun in 2005 by KAIST and the Korean Society for Next-Generation Computing to raise people’s concern over next-generation computing and to prepare for the upcoming ubiquitous era.
‘UFC’ refers to a wearable computer small and light enough to be worn on human bodies or clothes so that users can use computers with no restriction while moving. This terminology was created by Korea.
The contest includes designated items division and free items division, and not only university students but also general public can participate in the free items division. Teams qualified for the final contest in the designated items division will be offered wearable computer platform and 1.5 million won of production cost. The final contest will take place at the UFC fashion show stage ‘Next-Generation Computing Exhibition’ at KOEX in November.
Hee-Joon You, Co-president of the Contest Committee and a professor of Electrical Engineering, stressed on the future life made joyful by IT technologies by saying, “Considering the title of the contest, we’ve selected ‘games enjoyed with UFCs’ as a mission of the designated items division to combine games, rising software, and wearing computers, hardware.”
UFC is a brand-new field that fuses IT technologies and fashion, seeking the improvement of computer technologies and fashion creation. UFC, a further advanced wearable computer than existing ones, is an important advanced field that leads computer industries in the ubiquitous era.
2007.04.23 View 14008