10th October 2017
Formula Student is a student engineering competition held annually. Student teams from around the world design, build, test, and race a small-scale formula style racing car. The cars are judged on a number of criteria. It is run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The Formula Student Team e-gnition Hamburg was sponsored by Xsens during the Season 2016/2017. The MTi-G-710 is mounted on the car to get high precision sensor data during the race. The measured data is used for multiple applications in the car.
A Formula Student race car has more than 100 HP and weights 200 Kg. To bring the power to the track, it’s necessary to control the slip of the four wheels. Since the car of e-gnition Hamburg has one motor on every wheel the application needs the absolute velocity of the car. While a normal GNSS receiver has to slow data rates, the Xsens IMU delivers good speed estimation every few milliseconds.
Torque Vectoring
The four-wheel driven concept allows us to regulate the torque of every single wheel. A good Torque Vectoring makes high speed in curves possible, but it also needs a good controller and also good, precise and high frequent sensor data. This Torque Vectoring controller uses the inertial sensor data of the provided MTi-G-710.
Testing of a self-developed IMU
As a formula student team, you want to have as much knowledge as possible to be able to understand everything about the car. This is necessary for the static disciplines during the competition and for a good evolution from season to season. So we decided to develop and tune our own IMU. But this is not possible without verification. The Xsens MTi-G-710 is used as a reference during the development of the self-developed IMU.
Evaluation of mechanical components
During testing of a race car, it’s necessary to find a good setup of all aerodynamic and suspension devices. To evaluate the different setups the mechanics take a look at the sensor data after each testing session and during the test of different mechanical components. A good setup of the car is needed to perform well during the dynamic disciplines at the competitions.
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