TUNGA — Unmanned Ground Vehicle

About

Focus

Completing a competition course of ramps, obstacles, narrow corridors, sign reading and target tasks with a single vehicle and a single software stack. The vehicle must perceive its surroundings reliably in changing light and on dusty ground, the operator must be able to take over at any moment, and no software fault may leave it unsafe.

Approach

TUNGA has a clear division of labour: one computer handles driving, mission management and the turret, the other perception with a 360° lidar and a stereo camera. Autonomous driving combines path planning with our own corridor driver. Propulsion runs on separate microcontrollers, and hardware always has the final say: emergency stop, an autonomy switch on the remote, a communication timeout and an independent watchdog. The operator follows live cameras, the map and system health from the vehicle's web console. MERGEN, the air-defense system on top of the vehicle, and HUNTER, the next-generation turret of the v3 design, have their own project pages.

Role: QAYRA · Design, build and software
Timeline: 2024 — ongoing

Technologies

Autonomous driving
Computer vision
Sensor fusion
Embedded systems
Tracked mechanics
Remote operation

Highlights

TEKNOFEST 2026 · Şanlıurfa

2nd place in the Unmanned Ground Vehicle Competition — five places up from 7th in 2025.

360°

Perception

Mapping, obstacle, sign and target detection with lidar and a stereo camera.

Safety first

Whatever the software does, hardware has the last word — emergency stop and watchdogs are always active.

MERGEN air-defense system

The air-defense system (HSS) on top finds, tracks and locks onto targets with its camera — details on the MERGEN page.

Team

Academic advisor, captain and electrical, mechanical and software teams — meet them at qayralab.com/ekip.

v3 exterior design

Next-generation exterior design studies — UGV v12, UGV v13 and a wheeled all-terrain vehicle; the turret on v13 is HUNTER. All three sets are in the media gallery.