For the 6th time a team composed of meteorologists, gas balloons specialists and engineers from the HEIA-FR have worked together as the race head quarter of the swiss team of Laurent Scyboz and Nicolas Tièche for the Gordon Bennet race 2019. Members of FRISAM who have developped mathematical models of the balloons dynamics and trajectory predictions where part of the scientific team. This year the race started in Montbéliard (France). The Swiss team won the competition with a traveled distance of 1 774 km up to the Black sea in Romania .
Gas balloons before the start at the Gordon Bennett 2019 in Montbéliard.Final position of the Swiss team at the Black sea (Source La liberté).
In 2017, Shalev-Schwartz, Shammah and Shashua published an article on the preprint server arXiv entitled «On a Formal Model of Safe and Scalable Self-driving Cars». In this paper, a deterministic safety model called RSS is introduced and the article claims that if every road user adheres to the rules given by RSS, then no accidents can happen. The goal of this project was to inspect the article and to either validate the model or to find counterexamples to the claims made therein. Although the approach presented in the article seems promising, we were able to find shortcomings of the work by constructing scenarios in which RSS does not provide a guarantee for no accidents. Furthermore, we detected lines of thought along which the model could be refined.
Joint work with Corinne Hager Jörin and Florence Yerly.
