QCar

The Self-Driving Car Studio is the most academically extensible solution that Quanser has created. As a turnkey research studio, the Self-Driving Car Studio equips researchers with the vehicles, accessories, infrastructure, devices, software, and resources needed to get from a concept to a published paper faster and consistently over generations of projects and students. This capacity is enabled first by the powerful and versatile 1/10 scale QCars that have an unprecedented level of instrumentation, reconfigurability, and interoperability. To compliment the cars, the studio also comes with a rich infrastructure component that includes:

• Programmable traffic lights
• Durable and multipurpose flooring
• A collection of scaled accessories such as signs and pylons
• A preconfigured PC with monitors and network infrastructure.

Bridging from research to teaching applications, the studio comes with a one-year subscription to the QLabs Virtual QCar that mirrors and enriches the studio experience with a digitally twinned cityscape and virtual QCar fleet. This environment allows researchers to expand the potential scenarios that can be built to validate algorithms and behaviours. By bridging and blending code between the physical and virtual, researchers can explore new avenues for complex intelligence and behavioural analysis. For teaching, the virtual environment offers each student the opportunity to explore and develop when and where they want before testing and validating on the physical cars. Finally, across both teaching and research, our rich collection of research examples and recommended curriculum for MATLAB Simulink, Python, and ROS enables adoption without the need for extensive development of the fundamentals. Overall, the Self-Driving Car Studio is a multi-disciplinary and multipurpose turnkey laboratory that can accelerate research, diversify teaching, and engage students from recruitment to graduation.