Team 24: Triton-AI Autonomous Racing at UC San Diego
Designing and Prototyping an emergency brake system and smart steering system for a racing kart
Spring 2023 MAE 156B Sponsored Project
Sponsored by Jack Silberman, UCSD Faculty
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Overview of Automonous Racing UC San Diego
Overview of Automonous Racing UC San Diego
For our senior design project, we were sponsored by TritonAI, or more specifically their head Dr. Jack Silberman, to primarily help them create an emergency brake for their fully autonomous go-kart.
The TritonAI group is a student organization that focuses on building autonomous vehicles in order to compete in various racing competitions, such as the evGrandPrix. With an everchanging set of Autonomous Karting Series (AKS) guidelines, every year brings a new challenge or design required to fulfill those rules. This year, a new rule was added in which karts needed some an emergency brake that could stop the kart within 10 meters of activation, or fully locks the wheels. Additionally, because racing competitions have teams from different backgrounds and therefore have varying levels of tools and technology available to them, TritonAI strives to keep their projects open-source to allow other teams that don't have the time or tools to create designs themselves the option of using TritonAI's solutions. This emergency brake project is no different, and serves as one of many viable solutions to solve the problem laid down by the AKS guidelines.
What is Our Team Trying to Accomplish?
What is Our Team Trying to Accomplish?
Our main goal for this senior design project was to equip a fully autonomous racing kart with an emergency brake system due to the new change in the AKS guidelines.
The emergency brake's functionality is to brake the kart once power supporting the kart is turned off. As a result, we were tasked with designing and implementing a brake system that would either stop the kart within 10 meters once activated, or fully lock the wheels. Also, due to the open-source nature of the project, we also documented and detailed our process in building this emergency brake system, from the CAD models representing various components of the final emergency brake system design, to the specific materials chosen for those various components. We are meant to serve as a beginning step to designing and constructing an emergency brake system to allow others in the future to not only reconstruct our work, but to improve on it.
Our Team Working on the Project!
Our Team Working on the Project!
Final Design
Final Design
Our current emergency brake system contains 6 important components:
A brake caliper that clamps onto the axle's rotor in order to stop the kart
A brake caliper mount that holds the brake caliper at the correct location
A spring that connects to the brake caliper to allow or disallow contact between the brake caliper and the rotor
An electromagnet that is connected to the power supply of the kart
An electromagnet mount that holds the electromagnet at the correct angle and location
A lever arm that connects the brake caliper and electromagnet, allowing the brake to engage and disengage based on the state of the electromagnet
We have also proposed additional parts to the system that would help it with lessening the force the frame feels when the emergency brake activates and making it easier to arm the emergency brake initially. However, due to time constraints, some of these components are not on the final design of the emergency brake and are only proposals for future iterations of this emergency brake design.
Our sponsor also requested for us to reconstruct a smart steering wheel set-up built by a previous team, which we did and improved on it.
Summary of Performance Results
Summary of Performance Results
Executive Summary.pdfPage updated
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