Driverless car takes Greek students all the way to MIT
A driverless car designed by three students from the Model Gymnasium of Anavryta in Maroussi, northern Athens, won the Race Car Challenge international competition, organized at MIT by the Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI) in Boston.
The three high-school students behind the design – Philippos Efstasiadis, Michael Agapakis and Stelios Fiotakis – chose the name Illusionists for their group because, they state, “we have a bit of magic in us.”
“This is autonomous driving without a steering wheel. You program the little car, you put the location in the GPS and it goes by itself,” 17-year-old Stelios explains to Kathimerini.
They achieved the best time among seven foreign teams (from India, Japan, Italy and China) and seven American teams.
“Our autonomous race car clocked 57 seconds and the average time of the others was 2 minutes and 19 seconds. Each team’s car enters an obstacle course and its route to the finish line is timed,” said the IT teacher, Angelos Karafotias, who oversaw their project.
The students first attended an online coding and robotics program offered free of charge to students in Greece by BWSI through the Mathisi (Learning) initiative.
They then won a competition based on the Race Car Challenge course organized by Mathisi in collaboration with Pierce – American College of Greece, before traveling to the US.
The Beaver Works Summer Institute is the outreach program of a collaboration between the MIT School of Engineering and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
It was founded in 2016 with the aim of creating project-based courses to teach cutting-edge science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
