High School Student Designs And Builds Self-Driving Car System, Wins Science Fair

A high school student from Romania won the International Science and Engineering Fair and the 75 thousand dollar scholarship that came with by designing his very own self-driving car.

Ionut Budisteanu, 19, was able to design and build his own self-driving car, something that companies like Google have been attempting to perfect for years. Budisteanu was able to do so with some innovative thinking, which he revealed to NBC News.

"The most expensive thing from the Google self-driving car is the high resolution 3-D radar, so I was thinking how I could remove it,"

The high resolution radar that Google has been using cost 75 thousand dollars, but Budisteanu figured out a new way to design a self-driving car. Using a far less expensive 3-D radar that recognizes large objects -- such as cars and houses -- in addition to webcams and artificial intelligence to pick out smaller objects like curbs, lane markers, and pedestrians, Budisteanu was able to make a successful self-driving car. Out of the 50 trials he ran of the system, 47 trials were completed successfully, with the three failures occurring due to the system being unable to pick out pedestrians 65-100 feet away from the car. With better technology, this problem could be averted.

Budisteanu was able to make his self-driving car system for less than four thousand dollars, far less than the estimated cost that Google's self-driving system costs. This could mean that self-driving cars could become available to everyday people.

Budisteanu's motivation for creating his self-driving system was to reduce the amount of traffic accidents that happen every day.

"...87 percent of the car accidents are only because of human mistakes...They don't see the cars, they don't see the traffic signs ... the self-driving car will see everything."