Here at UQ myself and another team member have been discussing the idea of a data swap consortium. The idea being that participating teams would provide data captured by their DAQ system during competition weekends and any relevant testing. In return they have access to all the data that has been uploaded by other participating teams. In its simplest form it would be a read only dropbox of data from all participating teams and teams would be invited to the dropbox as they gave their data to whoever was managing the folder at the time. I'd like to think that in the spirit of collaboration people would be willing to share data with other teams in hopes of being able to benchmark different concepts against each other and gain a better picture of performance of the field and certain trends within it. eg 10" vs 13" wheels and tyres.
I think a new dropbox folder each year would be advisable as it requires teams to contribute a new dataset to continue to recieve new data from other teams. I envisage that certain requirements would need to be met in order to join the consortium, not to exclude younger teams but to make each team's data useful to an outsider. Things such as each team must submit a "spec sheet" and series of photos of the car the data was captured from along with their data. This way we have some idea of the car the data came from and the data has some relevence and usefulness. They would also provide the data in an organised fashion with notes describing the type of testing, weather, surface conditions (dusty, bumpy etc.) and any quirks that may need to be known about a set of test data. (ie. a certain sensor was calbirated incorrectly but can be corrected by doing x and y).
One of the challenges I can see would be the difference between each teams DAQ capability. Some teams run extensive data acquisition setups whilst other teams don't have the budget to do so. I'm not keen on the idea of setting a minimum requirement set of channels as I'd like the teams with less capable DAQ systems to be able to participate as well. However I would like to avoid a situation where a team may try to gain access to everyone elses data by only providing a very limited dataset of what they actually capture. I would hope that the more developed teams could see this opportunity as a great way to help younger teams develop rather than a place where their secrets may be revealed. I'm not sure entirely on the best way to tackle this at the moment except by having faith in people to do the right thing.
The other challenge I can see is the different formats provided by different DAQ systems. MoTeC is seemingly very common amongst teams at my competition (FSAE Australasia) but I have no doubt there are plenty of teams out there on other systems such as AIM, Bosch, Racepak or even their own systems. Most of the time this isn't an issue as the software to view the data is free but it would become an issue if there were teams using formats that only work with paid software.
This aim of this post is to gauge feedback. I'm curious to hear other peoples ideas about how something like this could run and whether their team would be interested in participating in such a consortium.