WATonomous

WATonomous is the University of Waterloo design team for Autonomous Vehicles. I joined the team in May 2022 under Perception.

I was about to leave the team but heard we got our hands on a new Kia Soul EV, so it’s time to do some good engineering work :))

This is me working on the car :))

Learn more at https://watonomous.ca/

• WATonomous Car

Compute

• Intel NUC
• RTX3090 mounted as an eGPU (using Razer Core X Chroma)

Sensors

• Flir Blackfly S (Camera)
  • Image resolution of 1920x1200 at 36FPS
  • IMX249 6mm 83 Front Left
  • IMX249 6mm 83 Front Right
  • IMX265 fisheye 180 Side Left
• Velodyne VLP-32C (LiDAR)
• NovAtel (GNSS)

Me working on the car.

Resources

• ASD Data Pipeline https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UdkSYG2ZMaCCc71JoeWvlMS6p9q0AY_f/view

Some of Interesting Challenges We Work On

• At what stage to do Sensor Fusion? Early Fusion, late fusion, mid-level fusion or sequential fusion?
• How do we gather enough data, since we are not a large company like Cruise or Tesla? $\to$ In house Synthetic Data Generation >- Simulation was mainly used for planning and control. We were running rosbags for testing Perception. However, we are looking into Sim2Real and synthetic data generation
• How to efficiently train multiple networks that share similar features? → Multi-Task Learning
• The Engineering challenge of Integration Hell using ROS

Pages

• WATonomous Style Guide (overkill) → just try to be consistent across the codebase
• WATonomous Cheatsheet
• WATonomous Perception
• WATonomous Field Usage
• WATonomous Infrastructure
• WATonomous Car
• WATonomous Logs

Important Software Development Concepts

• Docker $\to$ for all software development
• Port Forwarding $\to$ to forward displays such as Jupyter notebooks and VNC viewers

ssh -NfL 8886:localhost:8886 s36gong@trpro-ubuntu1.watocluster.local

People I need to talk to:

• Aryan Afrouzi (Interfacing)
• Shiv Patel (Mechanical)
• Saskia (Filmmkaing)

Related

• WATonomous Thoughts