#FormulaUSI 2022

The Software Institute is pleased to announce the second edition of Formula USI, which will take place from 11 to 13 November 2022 at the USI/SUPSI East Campus Lugano.

#FormulaUSI is a team-based competition aimed at building, programming, and racing 1:16 scale self-driving cars based on the project Donkey Cars.

The challenges

#FormulaUSI 2022 will test participants with two challenges: lane-keeping and head-to-head. In the first challenge, participants must programme their toy car to drive autonomously around a track at the highest possible speed. In the second challenge, their vehicle will have to compete against another car in a head-to-head knockout race.

These challenges require a series of steps. First, the team must collect driving data for coaching, such as manually driving the car around the track with a joystick. Second, the team needs to analyse the collected driving data to assess quality (e.g., remove erroneous driving episodes or perform data balancing between turns and straight roads). Third, the team must train a neural network that mimics the driving behaviour of the training set. Finally, the coached models will be transferred to the toy car for testing. The winner of #FormulaUSI will be the team that dominates in the head-to-head tournament. In addition, there will be prizes for the teams that score the best lap time (without going off the road) and the best average time.

Goals

Formula USI has educational, dissemination and social purposes. Formula USI is a new educational project to allow high school and college students to familiarise themselves with concepts related to artificial intelligence by working on a forward-looking but very current project, such as autonomous driving.

An additional goal of the event concerns the possibility of building a network to train future professionals in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving and establish collaborations between local, national and international entities.

Audience

Free access to the public on Saturday and Sunday.

More information is available at the dedicated website or by email.