IO, Surabaya – The Sapuangin Team of the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS), Surabaya, has again made a world-class achievement. In developing track lines and driving schemes through programming, the proud ITS team won second place in the 2021 Asia Shell Eco-Marathon (SEM) Autonomous Programming competition which was announced online, Friday (26/3/2021).
In this competition, the Sapuangin ITS Team showed the performance of its Electrical Division. As explained by the Head of the Electrical Division of the Sapuangin ITS Team, Muhammad Samsul Arifin, his team developed the track, perception, and control algorithm for autonomous vehicles in this competition using the Melodic version of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The code generated from ROS is then run using Microsoft Airsim on a virtual engine.
The division head, who is familiarly called Samsul, also said that the programming languages used are C++ and Python, based on the Ubuntu Linux 18.04 operating system. The eighth-semester student of the Engineering Physics Department also admitted that the work in this competition was new, as it had never been made by the Sapuangin Team before. “Our team started from scratch in building simulations for this competition,” said Samsul, in a release received by the Independent Observer, Monday (5/4/2021).
Although this is the first time participating in this kind of Autonomous Programming competition, the Sapuangin ITS Team managed to prove its skill. Also added by the Sapuangin ITS Team External Relations Staff, Rida Ayu Arfianti, the S021 Asia SEM Asia competition, which is usually held offline, has been switched to online due to the pandemic. The competition takes place from January to March 2021.
A month before the competition, the 32-member team prepared many aspects, from studying the competition rules, preparing the space requirements, to the hardware required. However, the pandemic situation and campus lockdown meant that the team’s activities and communications were limited to online.
Initially, the hardware specifications for participating in the competition became another obstacle. Luckily, despite the existing obstacles, the team guided by Ir Witantyo MEngSc and Dr. Ir Atok Setiyawan MEngSc managed to become the team with the second most effective trajectory and energy consumption, overcoming 100 teams from all regions.
Rida then explained the assessment category in this competition. She said the efficiency assessment was divided into four challenges, namely, regarding the time and distance traveled, energy consumption, and CPU Usage. In addition to efficiency, the goals obtained during the simulation are assessed. The points from the two are then accumulated to become the final score. “Our team earned 41 points and finally won second place,” said the student from Blitar.
After winning a competition that had never been participated in before, Rida hoped that in the future the Sapuangin Team could participate in a similar competition. “The work that we have made will be saved and become a benchmark for development in next year’s competition,” said the 2018 class student closing the conversation. (est)