ForzaETH team wins gold at the 2022 F1TENTH Autonomous Grand Prix Germany
ForzaETH, a team of students from the Center of Project-Based Learning at D-ITET (PBL) and the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) at ETH Zurich and UZH competed at two F1TENTH autonomous racing challenges and finished first place at the Germany 2022 grand prix. F1TENTH is a 1:10 scaled autonomous racing competition, where teams from all over the world aim to develop the fastest robotic racecar on the track.
After several months of preparation ETH’s team reached the 4th place (1st from the newbie teams) at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held on May 2022 in Philadelphia.
ForzaETH’s next challenge was the F1TENTH Autonomous Grand Prix Germany, held from 20 to 21 August 2022 at Lausitzring Eurospeedway, a motorsport racetrack and R&D testing facility for autonomous vehicles of the ADAC in Brandenburg. On the first day of the competition ForzaETH managed to win the qualifying, by completing the highest number of consecutive laps on the track with the lowest laptime, therefore securing pole position for the head-to-head grand prix of the second competition day.
The head-to-head phase consisted of a knockout tournament of two cars on track; whoever finished 15 laps first proceeded to the next round. ForzaETH moved forward through the racing bracket and reached the finals. In a very tight final, the ETH team managed to secure the first place and brings home gold!
Congratulations to the ForzaETH team!
PBL researchers:
Edoardo Ghignone, Nicolas Baumann, Jonas Kühne
D-ITET undergraduate students:
Nadine Imholz, Luca Schwarzenbach, Florian Bolli, Jonathan Becker, Daniel Pfister
INI researchers:
Xiang Deng, Marcin Paluch
ForzaETH is also part of the PBL flagship project F1Tenth where students carry out thesis projects, and it is one of the ETH+ Future Learning Initiative activities.