VW
Stanford / VW Autonomous Driving
Last week I was half invited and I half invited myself to attend a meeting for the Stanford Autonomous Vehicle Racing Team along with my VWoA-ERL coworkers. Some interesting ideas were mentioned, such as a method for re-lighting a scene using a light scattering formula to reconstruct points’ surface normals and textural qualities from velodyne data captured by Junior (by Jesse Levinson). At the end of the meeting I offered some of my time to finish a system they’ve been developing for detecting traffic lights for their next-generation Junior vehicle! That should make April and May pretty interesting!
Volkswagen Internship
I started a 7 month internship with VW-ERL last month, working with the Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) team on confidential, vision-related things — if I told you, they’d have to kill me! I’ve already hit some significant milestones with the project they put me on; we finished the second internal release (since the project’s conception, earlier last year) as of Friday, which included two components I developed! My biggest challenge so far has been to be as relaxed and fun-loving as my teammates! Suffice it to say, I’m having a great time.
For more on the DAS team’s achievements, check out their the ERL website. Also, be sure to check out “Shelly”, the autonomous TTS will set the first official autonomous land-speed record in May!