BACKGROUND:
Notice is hereby given by the University of Ottawa of the intent to enter into a contract with Quanser to procure:
• 4 x QDRONEs – Each quadrotor drone equipped with a powerful on-board Intel® Aero Compute Board. Equipped with a powerful on-board processor, RGB-D and optical flow cameras to enable high-quality on-board video processing, as well as streaming for real-time monitoring.
• QBots: 3 high performance, open-architecture mobile ground robots which are designed for teaching and advance research. It includes a real time control software and comes with complete courseware support for undergraduate courses and fully equipped with batteries and router. The real time control software platform provides a seamless application prototyping environment for autonomous multi-platform and multi agent research. It supports third-party localization systems.
• QCars: Self-driving car prototype platform with 3 cars: 1) Each 1/10 scale model car with the following equipment: 2D Lidar, RGBD Camera, 360° 2D MIPI Cameras, Motor encoder, IMU sensors, Nvidia TX2 Processor, Headlights, brake lights, turn signals, Microphone, speaker, User expandable IO for SPI, I2C, CAN Bus, GPIO, additional encoders. 2) User customizable mechanical breadboard for mounting custom hardware 3) Extensive app A real time control design and deployment software:
• lication development examples ranging from low-level sensor interfacing to high-level machine learning examples, 4) Software and application support for Python (Q4 2019), C, MATLAB/Simulink, ROS (Q1 2020), 5) Pre-compiled virtual reality simulations with HIL, supporting user created visualizations with Unreal Engine 4 Support for multiple artificial intelligence and machine learning toolchains
• 12 x Cameras: Natural Point Optitrack Flex 13 Localization Cameras.
• 1 x Ground Control Station - High performance computer, router, 3x Monitors, USB flight controller.
• 1 x NS_1 - Floor Mats and Protective Netting for Nominal Space 1: 7m x 7m x 3m
These items will be integrated into the Smart Connected Vehicles Innovation Lab, which is an open access research facility at 535 Legget Drive (Kanata) for the University of Ottawa.
PROCESS:
Suppliers that consider their equipment functional, successfully tested, readily available and fully compliant to the ACAN minimum requirements may submit, in writing, a statement of specifications to the contact person identified in this Notice, on or before the closing date of this Notice. In the statement of specifications, the supplier must unequivocally demonstrate how their equipment, at minimum, equals, or exceeds the stated requirements.
If no other supplier submits a statement of specifications, on or before the closing date of this Notice, the competitive requirements of the University of Ottawa will be considered having been met. Following notification to any suppliers not successful in unequivocally demonstrating that their statement of specifications equals or exceeds the requirements set out in this Notice, the contract may then be awarded to the pre-identified supplier.
Date of issue: May 18, 2021
Closing Date: May June 1, 2021, at 3:00:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
INTENDED USE:
The requested equipment is a key component to the research program that will be pursued in the research facility. The research program will develop digital solutions to acquire sensory data collected from a connected and autonomous vehicle test-bed in the laboratory and a network of connected vehicles moving around the city, and introduce artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies to analyze the sensory data in real time on a back-end compute cluster. Furthermore, the research program will specifically utilize this open access facility to lay the foundation of innovative solutions to integrate distributed resources of edge devices, such as portable sensors and vehicle equipment, and couple them with machine learning in order to offer the benefits of operationalization of the data analytics-backed vehicular sensing services. The research involves the following types of experiments:
• Vehicular Sensory Data Fusion and Acquisition Solutions on the AVRS test bed
• Intelligent communication and computing solutions integrated with the AVRS test bed hardware and software
• Communication Security experiments on the AVRS test bed
• Sensor data coupled safety tests
• QDrone and QCar-assisted surveillance experiments
FUNCTIONALITY:
The equipment must conform to all of the following Minimum Requirements:
• Multiple open architecture Self-Driving Cars
• Multiple open architecture quadrotor vehicles, ground mobile Robots
• Infrared Indoor localization system
• Ground Control Station
• Software Licences for a Real Time Control Software
• All necessary accessories and peripherals for the above mentioned equipment
• Seamless cross platform compatibility and out of the box integrating, allowing them to be used in any desired combination and quantity
Justification of Pre-Selected Supplier:
Supplier: Quanser Consulting Inc.
Justification:
• Complete turn-key nature of the provided system where all required hardware and software components, client specific integration and cross-compatibility of all systems and vehicles, training, support and ongoing collaborations are all provided
• Open architecture design of the vehicles and their associated hardware and firmware. This means that no element of the autonomous vehicles test bed is black boxed to the user and users gain direct and open architecture access to all the sensing and actuating elements of the vehicle. This allows researchers to develop and deploy their own control algorithms and custom code on the vehicles.
• Self-driving car is also the sensor rich, extensible platform equipped with SPI, I2C, serial, CANBus, GPIO, Ethernet, USB 3.0, USB OTG, PWM, analog inputs, additional encoders with hardware digital tachometers etc., plus support of TensorFlow, Python, ROS, API’s, and MATLAB/Simulink, no other solutions can match it’s compressive coverage, expandability and flexibility
• All vehicles and systems can be programmed and controlled using MATLAB/Simulink. The open architecture nature of the hardware plus integration and compatibility with MATLAB/Simulink for rapid prototyping and deployment have proven to be the two most important requirements for researchers in the Autonomous Vehicles field. The Quanser AVRS/SDRS is the only research grade autonomous vehicle solution on the market that meets both of these requirements simultaneously and the cross platform compatibly.
