Autonomous Vehicles
The finals of The 12th Future Automobile Technology Competition hosted by Hyundai Motor Group were held at the ITS test circuit of Traffic Safety located in Hwaseong-si, Gyeonggi-do on Oct. 2. Even with a shower on that day, the venue was very hot with the fever.
The Future Automobile Technology Competition is the only automobile-oriented competition in Korea in which college students compete with one another by manufacturing actual automobiles. This competition started in order to provide opportunities for students to apply their creative ideas regarding future automobile technologies directly to cars.
In particular, since the tenth competition in 2010, the theme of competition has become ‘Autonomous Vehicle Competition’ for the first time in the world, so that participating students can make unmanned automobiles by themselves that drive the circuit. Autonomous vehicles are defined as cars that can drive to the target destination without a driver by self-controlling steering, shifting gears, accelerating, and braking based on driving condition recognition devices such as radar, cameras, and GPS.
At this competition, the top four teams (KAIST, Seoul National University, Kookmin University, and Hanyang University) out of 12 participating teams to the finals, based on scores from preliminaries, performed the final demonstration of their autonomous vehicles to the audience and the winner was selected afterwards.
Hyundai Motor Group provided vehicles and funds (maximum 90 million won, US$84,662) for research to all twelve finalists including top four teams and enabled its advisory researchers to share their R&D experiences by technical sector with participating teams while each of them was working on team projects. As prizes for the winner, second place and third place were 100 million won (US$94,121), 50 million won (US$47,034), and 30 million won (US$28,236) respectively, participating students were very serious.
Autonomous vehicles are the hottest issue in the entire automobile industry. Currently, 5,400 people die and 1.78 million people are injured in car accidents every year. In addition, 12.8 trillion won (US$12.0 billion) of losses are incurred every year due to these accidents. If indirect damages are included into the calculation, total financial losses add up to 40 trillion won (US$37.6 billion) every year. It is highly expected that autonomous vehicles will radically decrease these casualties and losses. This is why major global automobile manufacturing companies including Hyundai Motor Group, of course, are trying very hard to secure their own technologies for self-driving cars. IT companies such as Google are also attempting to develop unmanned vehicles.
An associate at Hyundai Motor Group said, “Technologies found in the Autonomous Vehicle Competition including lane departure prevention system and advanced smart cruise function are actually applied in autonomous vehicles. Together with technologies of environment-friendly vehicles, autonomous car technologies will become the key to automobile industry in Korea. I hope this competition to contribute to expansion of overall research scope for self-driving cars in Korea.”