No, this story is not about students wasting time. Engineering students in China entered the finals of the third annual Freescale Cup University Smart Car Racing Contest at Northeastern University in Sheyang.
This year’s competition drew more than 600 teams from more than 270 Chinese universities, which is twice the number as in 2007. The final race narrowed the field to 104 competing teams from throughout China.
The racing contest at Northeastern University was the culmination of several months of student design and assembly of smart model cars built with Freescale’s S12 microcontroller (MCU) technology — the most widely adopted 16-bit MCU architecture in the automotive market.
Model cars competing in the camera group used lens imaging for navigation, while the optical-electronics group used optical communication for navigation.
Competing teams displayed and then raced their smart model cars, which are designed to operate autonomously and identify their route through each race course. Team scores were determined by how fast each race car completed the course.
Team Leopard from Northeastern University in Sheyang came in first place in the camera competition with a time of 18.388 seconds. Team Shou An No. 1 from the University of Science and Technology Wuhan was first to cross the finish line in the optical-electronics competition with a time of 24.597 seconds.
Freescale currently employs 4,000 people in China and maintains eight design labs with plans of further expansion. Freescale is the world’s No. 1 supplier of automotive semiconductors.
Source: Market Watch