KUCHING – Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus beat 38 teams to win the national level Freescale intelligent car challenge for the third consecutive year, recently.
The three students and two academic staff from the Australian branch campus won over their closest rival Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) by three seconds to take home the prize money of RM3,000.
The robotics and mechatronics engineering students, John Ranga Dinej Fernando, William Zon Kok Weng and Lim Hong Jian as well as their advisors Dr Hudyjaya Siswoyo Jo and Riady Siswoyo Jo, also earned an all-expenses paid trip to Seoul to compete in the Global Freescale Cup in August.
About 20 private and public institutions of higher learning in the country competed in the challenge at the Multimedia University in Cyberjaya. Each team was required to build, program and race a model car around a track for speed.
The model cars had to be embedded with Freescale’s microcontrollers and the fastest car to complete the track without derailing, wins.
“Changes in the challenges and rules that were different from previous years, were the greatest hurdles of the competition,” said Hudyjaya.
“The new rules imposed a more realistic implementation of autonomous driving. The competition is a platform for students to demonstrate their knowledge and creativity to solve real-world problems. Who knows, they might be one of the pioneers who design the autonomous driving that we will all enjoy in the future.”
Hudyjaya said that the next two months will be a busy time for the team as they will start working on the car right after their final exam next week.
“They will do their best to maximize the performance and improve the strategy/algorithm of the race car in order to get the best lap time in Korea,” he said.
Last year, Swinburne Sarawak took the national championship title and represented Malaysia in the Global Freescale Cup in Harbin, China. It went on to win the first runner-up spot after beating teams from eight countries including Bannari Amman Institute of Technology (India), The University of Tokyo (Japan), National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and the University of California Berkeley (US).
In 2012, Swinburne Sarawak won the championship and the first runner-up of the competition