Mohamad Sawan

Parts register / Part R1

Autonomous car

Pars Robotics · Programming captain · 2020–2024

Scale model of the autonomous car, held up in the arm's gripper
Fig. R1 Scale model, as the arm presents it on the home page. Rendered from the live scene.

Notes

Pars Robotics was where I cut my teeth. Programming captain for four years, on a team sponsored by NASA, Ford and Milsoft, with a reputation we had to keep.

The car

Built for the Teknofest Autonomous Vehicle Competition: lane detection, traffic-sign classification, obstacle avoidance and full-track navigation under a 25-minute time cap. The results varied from season to season.

  • Perception: OpenCV for lane lines and signs, plus a small CNN for sign classification.
  • Control: a hand-tuned PID over steering and a longitudinal speed planner that backed off in cluttered sections.

The rest

Along the way: a long list of FIRST Robotics Competition awards with the team, multiple 1st-place finishes at Turkish national championships in Istanbul and İzmir, and top-10 finishes at international competitions in the US and China. The autonomous car carried on after Pars with Asimov, my university team.