Lead a team! It's not too late to lead a Natcar team. We have funding for one more team, all we need is YOU to take it! Academic credit is available. This is a great opportunity to get project experience without having to worry about funding! Contact rhee.jordan@gmail.com if you're interested.
Natcar
Southern
California Natcar is an undergraduate design competition sponsored by
ViaSat and hosted by UC San Diego. Teams of undergraduate students
design, build, and race an autonomous car which must follow a track
marked by white tape on dark-colored carpet. Under the tape, there is a
wire carrying a 100mA rms 75kHz sinusoidal signal. The fastest cars
travel at average speeds of up to 10m/s. IEEE UCSD provides funding for
several teams to compete.
The goal of the Natcar project is to build an autonomous 1/10 scale RC car car that can race around track marked by a wire carrying a sinusoidal current. Two potential approaches are optics and magnetics. Since the course is marked by white tape, an optical approach might use a camera and image processing to try to “see” the track and determine the car’s position and orientation relative to the track. The electromagnetic approach relies on Faraday’s law of induction, which states that the induced electromotive force or EMF in any closed circuit is equal to the time rate of change of the magnetic flux through the circuit. If you place a coil near the track, a sinusoidally-varying EMF will be induced in the coil, the magnitude of which will depend on the coil’s orientation and distance from the wire. One can then feed this signal into a controller which will actuate the car's steering mechanism to steer the car back on track.
The competition is held annually in May in the form of a race. The competition website has more details. The team with the lowest total time, including penalities, wins!
Why Join Natcar?
Natcar is a great opportunity to get hands-on project experience while applying theory and skills learned in the classroom. While GPA will get you an interview, project experience will get you the job! Here is a subset of some of the technical and soft skills you can learn by working on the Natcar project.
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Technical skills
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Professional skills
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Boost Your Resume
- Differentiate yourself from the competition by showing you can get stuff done.
- Gain experience with technologies used in industry
- Establish a track record of success
- Show your passion for technology and problem solving
- Demonstrate leadership potential
Have Fun!
- The finished product is really cool when it works
- Great feeling of accomplishment when it's done
- Bond with your team over late nights of debugging
- Meet and socialize with other teams at the competition
- Show off your awesome project to your friends!
The Competition
The Southern California Natcar competition is held annually in Spring quarter at the UC San Diego campus. More information is available on the competition website.
The competition is in the form of a race. The team with lowest total time, including penalities, wins. The following exerpt from the rules describes the course.
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The course will be marked with 1-inch-wide white tape on top of dark-colored carpet. The tape marks the center of the course (i.e., the car is supposed to be positioned over the tape). The tape is put down on top of a wire which is formed in a complete circuit and driven by a 75 kHz sinusoidal 100 mA RMS current (±10%).
In addition, small pylons will be placed at various points along the course no less than 15" away from the tape and no closer than 15" to each other. A penalty of two seconds will be added to the lap time for each pylon that is hit by a car.
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The course may be of any length and configuration but all turns will have a radius greater than or equal to 3 feet. Typical courses in the past have been between 250 and 350 feet in overall length with at least one straight-away of 25 feet or more (see the race results to see the layouts used in previous years).
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The course may cross itself, but the crossing will never occur at an angle less than 60 degrees, although the crossing may occur in the middle of a curve.
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The course may have sections that are parallel to each other, but they will be at least 3 feet apart.
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At least 3 feet into a straight section of the course, the track may make a right-angle jog to the left or right of no more than 6 inches provided that the course then continues straight and parallel to its original direction for at least 3 feet.
Competition Results
IEEE UCSD has been participating in UC Davis Natcar since 2005. Starting in 2010, we are participating in Southern California Natcar. Here's how we did in previous competitions.
| Year | Team Lead | Competition | Date | Place |
| 2009 | Justin Li | UC Davis | May 21, 2009 | NA |
| 2007 | Justin Tse | UC Davis | May 21, 2007 | 11th Place |
| 2006 | Justin Tse | UC Davis | May 26, 2006 | 2nd to last |
Sponsors
Southern California Natcar is supported by generous grants from Viasat and IEEE.
Contact
Interested in joining team or leading your own team? Have questions about the competition? Contact Jordan Rhee, Socal Natcar Chair, rhee.jordan@gmail.com. This project's google group is: http://groups.google.com/group/ieee-natcar
Rules
