Panasonic Automotive Systems (PAS) engineers embrace technology with a youthful spirit. These are the engineers that make up the Challenge Club. Under the concept of Mutually Providing Room for Growth, volunteers gather to enjoy various technical challenges away from their daily work.

The Challenge Club was started in 2019, led by PAS engineers responsible for the development of advanced in-vehicle related technologies. Engineers from Panasonic Group companies have joined the club, which now has approximately 300 members. While taking on the challenge of diverse activities to broaden their horizons, learn new technologies, and expand their networks of contacts, they also actively participate in technology contests outside the company.

One such contest is the Japan Automotive AI Challenge (sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan, Inc.). The new technological domains represented by CASE are becoming the core of competition, so this is an international competition for AI technologies related to automated driving, with the aim of discovering and fostering engineers who will drive the automotive industry in the future. Based on preliminary tasks, the contestants create simulation data for automated driving, and in the finals, they use this data to drive a real vehicle automatically and compete based on driving data such as whether they were able to avoid obstacles and other vehicles, as well as their driving time.

Two teams from PAS competed in the 2022 competition, winning high honors by placing third in the general class and fourth in the advanced class. Two teams advanced to the finals of the 2023 competition, and two participants received the Community Contribution Award/Public Relations Award for their efforts.

The following are comments from employees who participated in the competition:

An automated driving system consists of three components: cognition, judgment, and control. Of these, I am mainly involved in cognition and judgment in my daily work. However, learning the software construction of all processes through this competition helped me better grasp the complexity of automated driving systems and the importance of software in automated driving, which involves human lives.

In large-scale systems like automated driving, it is important to divide roles and develop systems through strong communication. It is very important to work in diverse teams that can leverage different areas of expertise, which also applies to our daily work. I encourage junior members to participate in external technical contests. In every contest, the mission is to understand a new theme and complete the development within a set timeframe. Completing missions like this is also a part of our usual work. Participating in external contests allows you to objectively evaluate the levels of your technical skills. Learning from people with more advanced skills helps improve your skills and inspires motivation. Please take advantage of opportunities to grow as an engineer.

The competition uses open software (OSS) to create data for simulated driving. With OSS, all the details of the software are open to the public, and the development is being carried out by the community, including the general public. By running this software and seeing what is going on inside, we can gain insight and knowledge that are hard to come by in our daily work.

At the award ceremony, I enjoyed the opportunity to interact with people from different industries, including the IT industry, and exchange ideas directly with them about the state-of-the-art in software development and how they are honing their skills. At PAS, we are steadily developing product-level technology that is in line with car manufacturers, as opposed to OSS developers who are using the latest knowledge of the software industry and automated driving. I am excited by the idea that we may be able to merge these values to create even greater value.

After performing well in the qualifying rounds, we went into the finals with high hopes of placing high in FY2023. However, when it came time to try out the actual device, things didn’t go well in the early stages of practice... The reason for our defeat was that we were not able to respond to the parts that were not obvious or articulated in the simulation environment. We needed to accumulate know-how specific to the actual equipment, such as reading parameters more deeply and fine tuning on the actual equipment.

I like the fact that participating in technical contests gives me time and opportunities to get away from my daily work and genuinely think about manufacturing. It was also great to have the opportunity to talk with engineers from other companies and students. By having a broad antenna, I was able to review my daily work from a new perspective, and it was very stimulating. Even within the company, I really appreciate the horizontal connections that can be made that are different from my daily interactions at work. When I’m having a tough time at work, it is really reassuring to have colleagues who can sympathize with me and give me advice. I myself tend to not have emotional leeway in my life because of the work in front of me, so that is why I want to continue these activities that help me have better peace of mind.

I was in charge of developing certain countermeasures, making use of my experience in sensor development. Each team member has their own area of technical expertise, and although we often divide up the roles and proceed in different ways, I felt the need for everyone to develop with at least some understanding of the overall system.

Unfortunately, I was unable to participate on the day of the finals due to an overseas business trip, but I did have the opportunity to speak with an automated driving engineer on that trip. Much of the vocabulary and technology they used was shared with the software from the competition, and through the competition we were able to recognize once again that we had encountered automated driving technology that is used around the world. Even apart from automated driving, there are many elemental technologies that are fundamental in various fields that I learned from the Japan Automotive AI Challenge, and I feel that this was a valuable hands-on learning opportunity with the technologies that we will need in the future.

Engineers continue to study throughout their lives, and it is a joy to accomplish this with their colleagues. Through participation in the Japan Automotive AI Challenge, I have come into contact with the cutting-edge technologies and have gained confidence as an engineer, not only through the acquisition of skills and knowledge, but also by working through the challenge by creating and updating things with my own hands.

Participating in the competition helped me renew my sense of the depth of technology and feel that technology is genuinely interesting. In everyday work, it’s rare for a single person to do everything from start to finish because of clear division of roles, but in this contest, we had to complete the entire development by ourselves. Competing with others outside the company leads to personal learning and the enjoyment of overcoming challenges with colleagues, creating vitality for daily work as well. It also leads to more efficient work, and I believe that the effects of these efforts will strengthen the company.