ETH Zurich's Premier Racing Car Leaves the Competition in the Dust

A Thrilling Thursday Morning in June at Zurich Innovation Park

It’s a Thursday morning in June, around 10 am, at Hangar 3 in the Zurich Innovation Park at Dübendorf Airport. The hangar, serving as a bustling workshop, has walls lined with towering shelves filled with tools and components. In the center of the room, two nearly completed racing cars sit, missing only their tires and front sections. Five students, all in their early to mid-twenties, dart around the cars, some focusing intensely on their laptops, while others meticulously examine individual car components. Each is clad in a black and red T-shirt bearing the acronym "AMZ," which stands for Akademischer Motorsportverein Zürich. This is their workshop, where they prepare for the new Formula Student season.

Formula Student: Engineering the Future of Racing

Formula Student is a prestigious engineering design competition for students, where university teams around the world conceptualize and build race cars from scratch. These cars then compete against each other in a series of rigorous races, in categories for both electric and combustion engine vehicles. Teams can enter with autonomously driven cars or those with drivers. The competitions take place at legendary circuits like the Hockenheimring and the Hungaroring near Budapest. Each team is interdisciplinary, bringing together students from fields such as Computer Science, Mechatronics, Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Business Administration.

AMZ: A Legacy of Innovation and Speed

Founded in 2006 by students at ETH Zurich, the Academic Motorsport Club Zurich (AMZ) has been competing in Formula Student with purely electric-powered race cars since 2010. Over the years, Team AMZ has established itself as one of the top contenders in this category. In 2016, they set a world acceleration record with their electric car, which reached 100 kilometers per hour in a staggering 1.513 seconds.

Every year, the team redesigns and rebuilds their car from the ground up. The 2022 team has taken on the challenge of creating an electric racing car that can operate both autonomously and with a driver at the wheel. To achieve this, the students dedicate countless hours of their free time alongside their studies. But for them, the effort is more than worth it. As Emmanouil Andreopoulos from AMZ explains: “It’s an incredible opportunity to work on such a high-level, practical project. We get to use equipment here that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise.”

Pioneering Autonomous Driving Technology

The process of building the racing car is complex and demanding. After six months of intensive planning, the students begin constructing the car’s chassis and suspension, which takes approximately two months. Simultaneously, they develop the necessary software and hardware that enables the autonomous system to perceive its surroundings and translate that information into steering inputs.

Image processing plays a critical role in autonomous driving, allowing the car to recognize and navigate its environment. The AMZ team employs industrial cameras and LIDAR sensors to detect the track’s course. This year, to reduce the car’s overall weight, the team opted for a single camera instead of the two they used previously. To achieve this, they needed a very wide-angle lens and found the perfect match in the Kowa LM4HC lens. This lens provides a 112° field of view for a 1" sensor. “We tested various lenses and found the LM4HC to be ideally suited, offering both robustness and the wide-angle capabilities we needed,” says Andreopoulos.

Looking Ahead: A Promising Season for AMZ

As one of the leading teams in the 2022/23 Formula Student season, AMZ has high hopes for another successful run. Andreopoulos remains optimistic: “I’m really looking forward to the upcoming races, where our car will have the chance to prove itself in real-world competition.” With their dedication, expertise, and cutting-edge technology, Team AMZ is set to continue pushing the boundaries of electric racing innovation.