From left to right, School of Mechanical (Back row: David Onyango, Wickliffe Akaka, Allan Makwaka & Staff member, Mr. Pascal Aloo to the far right). From School of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (Front row: Anna Kamene, Elsy Ntinyari & Staff member, Dr. Ahuna). Other two members in the photo were participants from another participating university in France.
TUK students took part in Robotics Competition in the Self-Driving Car Racing category – June 10, 2023 at Gymnasium Jesse Owens, Avenue of Europe – 94230 CACHAN, Paris, France.
The autonomous car race was organized by ENS Paris Saclay. In this competition, 1/10th scale cars are programmed by students to detect and avoid obstacles and other participants. The development of autonomous cars requires skills in embedded computing, algorithms and artificial intelligence. The cars carry a camera and lidar (rotating laser rangefinder) to detect their environment and a nano-computer to understand this environment and calculate trajectories. The teams must both develop the electronics and the programming of the cars
The spirit of racing was less of competition and more of experimenting with advanced technologies: on-board vision, deep automatic learning (deep learning), mapping (SLAM: Simultaneous Location And Mapping). TUK Kenya team scooped the third position out of 9 teams in their category. Five TUK students, were serving a 2-month internship program under the Erasmus Student Mobilityprogram at the University of Paris-Saclay, IUT Cachan Campus.
Credit: [Festival de Robotique de Cachan, 2023, https://www.festivalrobotiquecachan.fr/ledition-2023/competitions-de-robotique-2023/]
