Cincoze DS-1202 Powers Aristurtle Driverless Race Cars in the Formula Student

Autonomous driving cars become the development focus and trend for the car manufacturers and providers. Many well-known university students around the world also prepare their career for entry into the automotive industry by participating in international Formula Student competitions. Cincoze DS-1202 embedded computer gave the Racing Team Electric & Driverless at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Aristurtle) a boost in the Formula Student competitions. 
 
Aristurtle consists of students from different departments, from Electrical and Mechanical Engineering to Physics and Economics. The racing team already has 9 years of presence in the field of design and construction of electric racing vehicles and has received significant distinctions in international Formula Student competitions.

Cincoze provided the racing team with a robust computer vision platform DS-1202. The DS-1202 is the heart of the driverless race car and responsible for the critical job to transform various data and signals into precise racing actions. 

Customer Requirement
Computer Vision
Cameras and LiDAR are used as eyes for driverless cars. They provide a clear view of the car's environment. They help the car to recognize and detect the location, speed and 3D shape of objects close to it. An embedded computer with NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 GPU was intended to use to process data from the sensors to provide the power to employ the neural network inference and model predictive control optimization.

Abundance of I/O
The student team looked for a computing hardware to connect the following peripherals to the APU (Autonomous Processing Unit): Multiple USBs for cameras, legacy COM ports for serial communication, two ethernet ports for LiDAR and telemetry device, and two Mini-PCIe for the APU’s CAN controller board and wireless connectivity. DIO is also required for connecting external LEDs for important ROS signals, such as velocity estimation and hardware status.

Thermal and Anti-shock
The students considered acquiring a computer with robust design. With the intensive CPU and GPU computing, heat dissipation becomes very important to avoid any potential throttling. In addition to thermal issue, industrial ruggedness like anti-shock and vibration design is required to withstand severe vibration conditions of the cars.

Why Cincoze?
Reliable GPU Comuting 
Cincoze DS-1200 series is powered by 9th/8th Gen Intel® Core™/ Pentium®/ Celeron® CPUs. Combined with NVIDIA® GPU power through PCIe expansion slot (up to 75 W), DS-1202 is perfect for AI applications such as autonomous driving, visual inspection, surveillance, deep learning and etc. As for the thermal, an external fan on top of DS-1202 is offered to create good airflow and good cooling. 

Rich I/O and Modular Expansion 
The DS-1200 comes with rich I/O interfaces, including 2x GbE ports, 8x USB ports, 1x DVI-I, 2x DisplayPort, 2x RS-232/422/485 ports, and a remote power/reset connector. Through Cincoze’s innovative CMI & CFM modularity technology, it allows users to expand extra I/O and functionalities, such as GbE/PoE ports, serial ports, optical isolated digital I/O and power ignition sensing function. In addition, DS-1200 series provides 3x full-size Mini PCI Express slots for wireless connectivity or CAN-BUS expansion of vehicle communication. There are also DS-1201 and DS-1202 models with one or two PCIe expansion slots.

Rugged Design
The DS-1200 is built with rugged extruded aluminum chassis. It features fanless, jumper-less, and cable-less design while providing a wide operating temperature range of -40°C to 70°C, a wide power input of 9V to 48V, and high tolerance of vibration/shock (5G/50G). It passed industry compilance EN50155 (EN50121-3-2) and EN60950-1 certifications for operations in harsh environments. 

In addition to DS-1200, Cincoze recently launched DS-1300 which is a powerful and expandable embedded computer powered by 10th Gen Intel® Xeon®/Core™ CPUs and supports one or two PCI/PCIe slots for applications requiring high computing power in harsh environments.

Click here for more Cincoze's application stories: https://www.cincoze.com/story.php