FS Team Tallinn is happy to announce that this season is going to be more ambitious than ever before. Our team has accepted a brand new challenge: building Estonia’s first driverless formula vehicle together with the traditional electric one.
In addition to our existing electric development team, we have put together a 15 member driverless team and are working towards the goal together. Formula SAE resembles the automotive industry and was originally formed from the same industry. It is a world class product development competition, which follows the latest trends in order to offer engineers high-tech industry challenges. While the Formula SAE series has been existing for over 30 years, the driverless formula vehicle was added to the series of internal combustion engine and electric vehicle just 2 years ago.
Our goal is to build Estonia’s very first driverless formula vehicle and finish at least 2 competitions in the summer 2019. We are going to use our last season formula vehicle FEST18 as the basis of the driverless one. The challenge for our young engineers lies within the fact, that no one has any previous experience in the field and the skills are only obtained practising. Additionally, the vehicle has to move fast and be ready to do that in just nine months, when the first competitions start. The vehicles are judged in the series of static and dynamic events similar to electric and internal combustion engine formula vehicle judging categories. Static Events are: Presentation, Engineering Design, and Cost Analysis. Dynamic Events include Acceleration, Skid-Pad, Autocross, and Endurance. The vehicle has to be able to drive on an unknown track and it has to make the same decisions the driver would.
We have already started making the driverless formula vehicle and both teams are working on their projects round the clock. We will see the results in just nine months, until then you can only support and wish luck to FS Team Tallinn. There is still a lot of work to be done!