Coordinators
Andrei Claudiu IATAGAN
Cosmin Constantin RUSU
Main topics
Cooperation
Interdisciplinary cooperation between the faculties of Politehnica Bucharest.
Team DRIFT is a team of students dedicated to the development of autonomous vehicles, from design to manufacturing and from simulation to testing in unknown environments. The team has the mission of creating functional robotic systems for field use. The team will participate in international competitions such as the European Rover Challenge (ERC), Bosch Future Mobility Challenge (BFMC), NXP Cup, and others.
The goal is to develop the research-and-development skills needed for the students who are part of our teams. Up to the present moment, part of the student team has built a series of two autonomous cars in the years 2023 and 2024 for the BFMC competition, with which they qualified for the international stage. These small-scale cars navigate the surrounding environment using Computer Vision and advanced control algorithms. BFMC is an international competition organized by Bosch, where the teams aim to develop automatic control algorithms for various situations encountered in the Automotive sector, from parking to obstacle avoidance and intersection navigation.
In the same area of interest is also the NXP Cup competition, where we had a team participating at the international stage in the year 2025. Similar to BFMC, the goal of the competition is the development of navigation technologies for mobile autonomous platforms. In this process they developed image recognition software optimized for the track. In this competition speed is important, and our team resorted to modifications of the mechanical structure for competitive advantage. The last student team is also the most numerous, namely PULSAR.
Almost 30 students from 10 different faculties are participating in their first year in the ERC competition, a student interdisciplinary contest between European teams. They are designing an autonomous exploration robot, accompanied by an autonomous drone that maps the terrain in order to fuse the data into a complex navigation algorithm. Robochallenge is another important competition where the students participated, more precisely in the Mini Sumo, Nano Sumo, Line Follower, and NXP Line Follower sections.
