For the participants of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, one of the best-known student competitions in the country, all of their experiments stay true to the scientific method and begin with a problem.
The Romanian high school senior who won the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore award at this year's fair brought two big problems to the table: 1) a large number of fatal and severe car accidents are the result of human error, and self-driving car technology - which many believe can reduce these numbers - is still very expensive. So, Ionut Budisteanu invented a self-driving car that's just about $70,000 cheaper than Google's version.
"Because I am a high school student and I was trying to create a homemade self-driving car, I couldn't use the same technology [as Google]," Budisteanu said in an interview relayed by guest blogger Sean Meehan in Education Week. "They use a very expensive 3D Lidar [type of a radar], so I decided to try to remove that part as much as possible."
In the beginning, Budisteanu's attempts to remove the 3D Lidar only yielded a 60-70 percent success rate. He was able to significantly raise those numbers though by using a much cheaper lidar system to recognize larger objects, curbs, signs and lane markings. Now, Budisteanu's success rate is near-perfect.
Currently working on graduating, Budisteanu's new connections in the world of computer science and Artificial Intelligence should come in handy since that's what he's planning on studying during and after college.
To read Meehan's full report and to learn more about the features of Budisteanu's self-driving car, click here.
