SideStep

hardware setup for communication between rpis
user interface showing simulation
working hard :)

Inspiration

All my homies HATE rush hour. Who wants to wait 2 hours in a cramped car just to get to work?

But what do we hate more than traffic? CAR ACCIDENTS. In other words, the preventable loss of life. SideStep solves all of that.

What it does

SideStep offers a seamless Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) software integrated directly onto QNX OS, used in more than 250 million cars in the world and trusted by the 10 biggest automotive manufacturers in the world.

It allows smart cars on the road to communicate with each other incredibly reliably and extremely fast, which is essential in time-critical situations like avoiding collisions. It allows traffic on the road to work as a COLLECTIVE SMART SYSTEM, instead of every car being individual.

How we built it

SideStep was built directly on the QNX OS, which was installed onto Raspberry Pi 5s. After connecting the RPIs to our laptop's mobile hotspot, a UDP connection was then established between the two RPIs, so that they are able to send/verify each other's actions. The laptop listens in to connection and creates a simulation showing the position and maneuvering of the cars on the user interface.

The UI was built with JS/HTML and the embedded code was written in C++. The code was then moved onto the PI, and we SSHed into them to run the program on QNX.

Challenges we ran into

HARDWARE LIMITATIONS! Due to the Raspberry PI's limited computing power, lightweight ML models that were able to run on the RPI were not intelligent enough to provide the correct instructions in an appropriate amount of time. Thus, we needed to run a Gemini API on a laptop, and then send those instructions to the Raspberry Pi. In a real car with more powerful and dedicated chips, this "middle step" would not be necessary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the Raspberry Pis to communicate with each other. Getting the simulation to show cars avoiding a collision.

What we learned

First, establish a completely functional MVP before adding on additional features. Making a project realistic to the hardware limitations.

What's next for SideStep

Communication between several cars (more than 2). To be applicable in ANY traffic scenario (not just collisions), whether it's changing lanes or replacing traffic lights in intersections.