StarLine’s first self-driving hackathon

Published in

OSCAR

3 min readNov 12, 2018

On October 7th the first self-driving hackathon in Saint-Petersburg has successfully ended with 4 winners, tons of inspiration and fresh ideas.

It was a real fun and productive three-days with real hands-on work, a lot of energy drinks and all-night coding. Everyone was so dedicated and focused during the hackathon that some individuals forgot to eat.

Our hack day was solely devoted to development of ready solutions in the terms of security, economy and comfort of autonomous cars for citizens of Russia and the whole world.

So the ideas were solely generated by participants on the first day. Besides that, for each of our hackathoners we prepared Turtlebot 2 equiped with:

3D camera Orbbec Astra
Lidar RPLIDAR A2/A3
Razor IMU (SEN-14001)
Intel NUC

To provide a playground for CV we also built a special testing location with lane markings, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, etc.

By the end of the first day participants had presented their ideas and formed new teams. The next day teams arrived as early as possible to start prototyping and testing their solutions.

Extra energy sources on the second picture

All the teams have been working hard during all 3 days, showing good collaboration skills, perseverance and deep desire to win.

Finally, the demo day. Everyone were in a hurry, trying to finish all their tasks and prepare keynotes. At 2 p.m. everyone stopped and started presenting their ideas at the demo stage.