VDI Challenge - Capstone
A Penn State Behrend Capstone team used Ada for the VDI racing challenge: bare metal control with real time tasking and an OpenCV style Ada library, integrated into an event driven demo.
Penn State Behrend
Ada can gracefully handle almost anything. Initially designed in the 1980s for precise, low-level bare-metal applications, its structured and clean design allowed it to evolve naturally into higher-level use cases. Today, it remains a versatile systems programming language, much like C++, but with a leaner Reference Manual.
When AdaCore learned about the VDI Challenge, an annual European autonomous racing competition using 1/8-scale cars, it immediately thought, "Great match for Ada!" Autonomous vehicles require everything from precise embedded control to real-time image analysis.
AdaCore proposed the project to a Penn State Behrend Capstone team, who embraced it. Two students (Kevin Fox and Ryan Truax) focused on embedded hardware control, motors, steering, and real-time communication, using AdaCore's bare-metal runtime, including Ada's powerful real-time tasking facilities. The other two (Jared Daniel and Haris Siddiqui) developed an OpenCV-like Ada package, implementing their image-analysis algorithms optimized for performance.
Afterward, they integrated these components into a cohesive demonstration platform. Relying heavily on event-driven communication to coordinate behavior, the team successfully tackled the entire spectrum from bare-metal control to high-performance computing in a single project.
Kudos to their work! You can check it out here