The SZEnergy Team, which has been active at Széchenyi István University since 2005, is a student car racing team working under the mentorship of the Vehicle Industry Research Centre of the institution, which develops electric vehicles and autonomous solutions. The team is a regular participant at the world’s greatest student competition of the field, the Shell Eco-marathon. SZEnergy won with a world record last year and is also consistently among the forerunners in autonomous races. It was the third time that the SZEnergy participated in the competition and solved tasks related to development with considerable experience. SZEnergy's computer engineering team members played a crucial role in solving the tasks, while the researchers of the university’s Vehicle Industry Research Centre played a significant role in the preparation of the team.
This year’s programming competition was held in the same online format as the previous, making it easily accessible to all. The students from Győr competed with 25 university teams from all over the world, only 12 of which successfully completed the task without any major faults. Participants had to develop track planning, sensing and control algorithms for an autonomous vehicle using the Robot Operating System (ROS). The codes were then tested in a simulated environment, but the specific location of the points could not be known in advance, so a point tracking technique was used. The ranking was based on the consumption of the vehicle and its sensor system built in the simulation environment.
This time the Indonesians turned out to be the biggest rivals with two of their teams. SZEnergy managed to beat teams from renowned universities, such as the University of Alberta from Canada, or the universities of Munich, Illinois and Torino. The SZEnergy Team was rewarded for their hard work and respectable result with a prize of 2,000 US dollars.
The longer report published on the SZE website on this major international achievement was also quoted by several professional portals (e.g. newtechnology.hu, digitalhungary.hu, gyartastrend.hu, autoszektor.hu, autopro.hu) on their websites.