Quanser has been a part of the American Controls Conference (ACC) for years. If you’ve had a chance to go to ACC and you ask about Quanser one familiar response you’ll hear is “Oh yeah they are the pendulum guys!”. This quote refers to one of the core products in Quanser’s list of controls related devices, the Qube Servo 2. In its’ 30+ year history Quanser has had the vision to develop and introduce, to universities all over the world, a set of highly complex and feature complete solutions. With this line of thinking and introduced in 2020, the Quanser QCar has given researchers the ability to dream about taking the complexities and nuances of real world driving and bring them into an indoor university setting. What’ been the catch so far? How does Quanser (As a group of research minded design engineers) help bring this vision into reality? This takes us into ACC 2022.
In an effort to articulate all the research capabilities available to professors in an easy to conceptualize application, our Chief Operating Officer Paul Karam architected a 3-vehicle driving demonstration. Combining aspects of self-localization, a centralized infrastructure, artificial intelligence for sign recognition and the use of sounds as audible cues, Quanser brought to ACC an idea of how interconnected systems (which resemble the real world) could be brought into a university lab. The demonstration would also spark the interest of the ACC committee for 2023 which were interested in bringing the QCar back and potentially do a more interactive/engaging approach to self-driving applications.
