At the first joint hackathon between the University of Primorska UP (Slovenia) and HTWD, students programmed new functions for driver assistance and traffic sign recognition.

The week-long hackathon took place last week at the University of Primorska in Izola. The event was supervised by Professor Toralf Trautmann (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, HTWD) and Professor Branko Kavsek (Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies, UP FAMNIT). The nine computer science students, who had formed three teams, presented their results in short presentations on the final day. Two teams developed new display concepts for warning of critical situations based on an LED light strip (NeoPixel). The third team utilised an existing machine learning method in Matlab (ACF - Aggregate Channel Features) for camera-based detection of speed information. The Matlab programmes created will be published on the Mathworks File Exchange platform: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/

The hackathon will then take place at HTW Dresden in September 2025. Here, the developments will be extensively tested in real vehicles on the HTWD test field. This will give participants a comprehensive insight into the entire vehicle software development process.

Further information on the process and the use of the results can be found at https://mechlab.de/famnit_htwd_hackathon/.