Indy Autonomous Challenge
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The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the main and, between July 2023 and April 2024, the only active racing series for autonomous race cars. The vehicles participating in the IAC are SAE level 4
autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defi ...
as they are capable of completing circuit laps and overtaking maneuvers without any human intervention. Exclusively made up of student/university teams, each team participating in the competition uses the same vehicle, a custom-built
Dallara Dallara Group S.r.l. is the largest multi-national Italian race car manufacturer, founded by its current President, Giampaolo Dallara. After working for Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini and De Tomaso, in 1972 in his native village of Varano de' M ...
AV single-seater. The AV-21 was derived from Dallara's IL-15 model with the addition of sensors, actuators and computing hardware necessary for fully
autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defi ...
driving. By 2024, the series was using the Dallara AV-24 specification, with the same base Dallara chassis but an entirely re-engineered compute hardware, sensor suite, and software stack. The participating teams are made up of university researchers from universities worldwide, including
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
,
Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
,
University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...
,
KAIST KAIST (originally the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) is a national university, national research university located in Daedeok Innopolis, Daejeon, South Korea. KAIST was established by the Korean government in 1971 as the ...
,
Politecnico di Milano The Polytechnic University of Milan (, abbreviated as PoliMi) is a university in Milan, Italy. It is the largest technical university in the country, with about 40,000 enrolled students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate, and higher ...
, TUM,
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (), located in Modena and Reggio Emilia, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, is one of the oldest universities in Europe, founded in 1175, with a population of 20,000 students. The medieval university disappeared by ...
,
ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...
,
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his The Lawn, Academical Village, a World H ...
and
Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...
. The first race took place in October 2021 on the
Indianapolis Motor Speedway The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a motor racing circuit located in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is the home of the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, and and formerly the home of the U ...
(IMS), after an initial three-year period of simulator-only challenges, which started in November 2019 as a proving ground to allow competing teams to develop and demonstrate the ability to race autonomously before receiving the physical race car. Since then, the competition has raced on several notable oval circuits such as
Las Vegas Motor Speedway Las Vegas Motor Speedway (track complex formerly known as Las Vegas Speedway Park from 1993 to 1996, Las Vegas Speedway in 1992, Las Vegas International Speedway from 1990 to 1992, as the Las Vegas International Speedrome from 1972 to 1990) is a ...
and
Texas Motor Speedway Texas Motor Speedway (formerly known as Texas International Raceway from September to December 1996) is a quad-oval Oval track racing#Intermediate, intermediate speedway in Fort Worth, Texas. It has hosted various major races since its inaugura ...
, and in June 2023 in its first road course circuit, at the
Monza Circuit The Monza Circuit (Italian language, Italian: ; ) is a race track near the city of Monza, north of Milan, in Italy. Built in 1922, it was the world's third purpose-built motor racing circuit after Brooklands and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, In ...
. Over the four years of on-track IAC competitions, the challenge has advanced to include two competitive events. Beginning in 2021, individual time trials are run by all teams over the course, and the event is scored with the fastest lap achieved in five minutes on an oval track. Later, a multicar event was added: a two-car scripted passing competition, with increasingly higher speeds assigned to the lead car, where the two cars "keep passing each other like a game of cat and mouse until one of them has to give up, or they have an accident.” By 2024, the autonomous racecars were achieving top-speeds on oval circuits of and the two-car passing races were achieving successful passes of a fixed-speed vehicle maintaining 160 mph.


Motivation and summary of achievements

As a successor of the
DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American vehicle automation, autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Uni ...
, the IAC aimed to provide a challenging environment for the development of autonomous vehicles. University teams were invited to develop software for solving the autonomous driving task, in the challenging environment of a racetrack, constrained by IAC rules through 2024 that limit only one or two cars to be on the race track at a time, and limit the autonomous control approach to only six camera sensors on the vehicle. During the competition, teams used simulation environments and
cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...
to test and prove the maturity of their algorithms. As the IAC race cars were to drive on track up to 290 km/h (180 mph) with high lateral and longitudinal accelerations, the software needed to plan a path in an adversarial environment and to drive safely and reliably with low computation times. Overall, three main goals were set for the IAC in 2021: # Defining and solving edge case scenarios for autonomous vehicles; # Catalyzing new autonomous driving technologies and innovations; # Engaging the public in the competition to help ensure acceptance. The efforts of the IAC were initially led by Energy System Network, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit. The goal of the IAC was to focus on the development of a full
autonomous driving Vehicular automation is using technology to assist or replace the operator of a vehicle such as a car, truck, aircraft, rocket, military vehicle, or boat. Assisted vehicles are ''semi-autonomous'', whereas vehicles that can travel without a ...
software stack that enabled perception, planning and control on the racetrack. During its multiple years of operation, the IAC achieved a number of records, beyond the speed records for an autonomous vehicle on every racetrack the competition visited. The Autonomous
land speed record The land speed record (LSR) or absolute land speed record is the highest speed achieved by a person using a vehicle on land. By a 1964 agreement between the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) and Fédération Internationale de M ...
, was obtained on 28 April 2022, on the
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runway, where a Dallara AV-21 reached the speed of 309.3 km/h (192.2 mph) The scientific research from the IAC teams has led to several academic publications, mostly on the topics of
automatic control Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...
,
path planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...
and robotic perception.


History


IAC Simulation Race

In order to qualify for the participation in the real championship, the participating teams had first to show their autonomous driving capabilities on a simulator, by completing a series of
hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of '' hacking'' and ''marathon'') is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 h ...
challenges of increasing difficulty, starting from a solo lap and simple obstacle avoidance to 1-to-1 full races. The simulation environment provided the teams with a perfect replica of the
Indianapolis Motor Speedway The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a motor racing circuit located in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is the home of the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, and and formerly the home of the U ...
and of the Dallara AV-21 Racecar. The simulation-only competition peaked with the IAC Simulation Race, which took place on June 30, 2021. It consisted of a qualification round, where the teams had to complete their fastest solo lap, with time penalties attributed for violating the track limits. Then, the teams were split into two 8-vehicle semifinal races in order to qualify for the final. In the semifinals and in the final, many vehicles were disqualified for causing collisions with other vehicles, with the race stopped and re-started every time a collision happened. The final times of the semi-finals were used to determine the running order of the final race, which concluded with the victory of team PoliMOVE, which started from pole position and defended its place along the 10 laps. The winning team was awarded US$100,000, while the second place team (TUM Autonomous Motorsport) received US$50,000


Indy Autonomous Challenge Simulation Race Final Standings

*DSQ = Disqualified *DNQ = Did Not Qualify *DNF = Did Not Finish


IAC autonomous vehicle races


IAC at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2021

After the simulation race, 9 teams purchased the vehicle, and were admitted to the first physical race. Some of the teams participating in the simulation race merged in order to split the financial burden. The Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) took place on October 23, 2021. Although in the original intentions of the organizers it should have been a full 10-vehicle traditional race as it had been the case of the IAC Simulation Race, eventually the scope of the competition was reduced to a time trial event with an obstacle avoidance test. The race, together with its US$1,000,000 prize, was won by TUM Autonomous Motorsport after many teams had to retire from the competition due to crashes, with Euroracing on the second place of the podium, while PoliMOVE crashed against the wall but, as it had already scored its time, was granted the third place.


IAC at the Las Vegas CES, 2022

The next Indy Autonomous Challenge competition took place on January 7, 2022, at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway (LVMS), as the final event of the 2022 edition of the
Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...
. The event itself was limited to CES attendees but was live streamed. After the single-vehicle time trials of the Indianapolis event, it was decided to have another competition with the autonomous race cars, this time with more than a vehicle on the track. To simplify the task for the teams, the "Overtaking Game" format was chosen for the race, where a defender car had to keep a constant speed, while an attacker vehicle had to complete the overtake before the end of the lap. Once the overtake had been completed, the roles would swap and the defender speed would be increased. The teams had to perform a complete and safe overtake on track in the test days before the event in order to qualify for the race matches, which were held on a tennis-style
elimination tournament A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: # One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentr ...
. To further simplify the environment, the defender was forced to stay on the inside of the turns. After winning the semi-final race against KAIST, PoliMOVE won the 2022 IAC Las Vegas Race by successfully completing an autonomous overtake over TUM Autonomous Motorsport defending at 150 mph (240 km/h). The German team spun out of control after performing an overly aggressive obstacle avoidance manoeuvre while car #5 (PoliMOVE) was ultimating its overtake.


IAC 2022-2023 Season

The success of the 2022 IAC competition in Las Vegas encouraged the series to expand towards new circuits.
Consumer Technology Association The Consumer Technology Association (CTA)® is North America's largest standards and technology trade organization representing more than 1,200 technology companies. CTA is led by CEO and Vice Chair Gary J. Shapiro. Trade shows CES C ...
renovated the IAC's contract to perform at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After a summer break and a vehicle refresh, which included an increase of the engine power and new sensors and computing equipment, the cars were brought to
Fort Worth, Texas Fort Worth is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat of Tarrant County, Texas, Tarrant County, covering nearly into Denton County, Texas, Denton, Johnson County, Texas, Johnson, Parker County, Texas, Parker, and Wise County, Te ...
for the next challenge. The Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Texas Motor Speedway (TMS) took place in November 2023. A major change in the rules with respect to the 2022 Las Vegas edition consisted in the increased freedom of the defender vehicle to choose its trajectory, although right of way and minimum longitudinal and lateral separation rules were introduced to increase the safety of the competition. The race took place on a cold and wet racetrack after a morning of heavy rain. Similar to what had happened during the Simulation Race, many teams were disqualified due to either causing a collision or simply violating the minimum distance between the cars, as their algorithms could not safely handle the increased opponent freedom. Team PoliMOVE won the final race against AI Racing Tech. The 2023 Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway took place on January 7, 2023, following the same ruleset of the 2022 TMS Race. As the teams' software progressed, more advanced vehicle interaction and less incidents happened with respect to the TMS race. Team PoliMOVE won again, reaching a top speed of around 180 mph (289.682 km/h) during the event and beating its own speed record from the previous year.


IAC at MIMO 2023

At the 2023 Las Vegas event, the IAC announced its intention of coming to Europe, at the
Autodromo Nazionale di Monza The Monza Circuit ( Italian: ; ) is a race track near the city of Monza, north of Milan, in Italy. Built in 1922, it was the world's third purpose-built motor racing circuit after Brooklands and Indianapolis and the oldest in mainland Euro ...
in Italy, as part of the 2023 MIMO event. Five IAC teams participated in the event, which took place on June 16–18, 2023. Due to the increased difficulty of running on road course circuits with respect to ovals and the lack of complete GPS coverage of the track, the event format was once again a single vehicle time trial competition. Team PoliMOVE scored the fastest lap, while TUM Autonomous Motorsport took second place and TII Unimore Racing (formerly Euroracing) was on the lowest step of the podium.


IAC at Las Vegas CES 2024

At CES®2024, the Indy Autonomous Challenge unveiled the IAC AV-24- the next-gen autonomous vehicle platform in the racing series. Teams PoliMOVE, TII Unimore Racing, and AI Racing Tech demonstrated autonomous laps with the AV-24 cars at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway on January 11th, 2024. The remaining teams with the older AV-21 autonomous cars participated in the autonomous passing challenge. TUM Autonomous Motorsport faced Cavalier Autonomous Racing from University of Virginia in the final round. The Cavalier race car accelerated as the defending car in the final round which is prohibited by the competition rules and the round had to end with TUM Autonomous Motorsport declared as the winner, and Cavalier Autonomous Racing finishing second. The first Semi-Final took place between MIT-PITT-RW and Cavalier Autonomous Racing with Cavalier Autonomous Racing passing the MIT-PITT-RW car at 143 mph before the round ended. The second Semi-Final saw TUM Autonomous Motorsport go head-to-head against KAIST with TUM emerging as the winner of the semi-final.


IAC at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2024

The second IAC race at the
Indianapolis Motor Speedway The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a motor racing circuit located in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is the home of the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, and and formerly the home of the U ...
was run on 6 September 2024, three years after the first autonomous Indy Autonomous Car race was first run on this track. Ten teams of students—almost all
graduate student Postgraduate education, graduate education, or graduate school consists of Academic degree, academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications usually pursued by higher education, post-secondary students who have ...
s— from 19 engineering schools competed.Indy Autonomous Challenge returns to IMS
WishTV, 6 August 2024.
Even though this was the fourth year of the IAC competition, the races are still restricted to just two competitive events. Individual time trials are run by all teams, and the event is scored with the fastest lap achieved in five minutes on the track. The only multicar event is a two-car scripted passing competition, with increasingly higher speeds assigned to the lead car, where the two cars "keep passing each other like a game of cat and mouse until one of them has to give up, or they have an accident.” The time trial winner was Cavalier Autonomous Racing from the
University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his The Lawn, Academical Village, a World H ...
(car #9) at . The winner of the passing competition was the Italian team PoliMOVE-MSU (car #5) where the lead car was limited to and Poli-MOVE-MSU passed it, briefly achieving a speed of 10–20 miles per hour faster.Claire Curry
Indianapolis Motor Speedway hosts Indy Autonomous Challenge
Fox 59 News, 6 September 2024.
The second place team in the passing competition was unable to pass car #5 at the 160 mph increment, but had successfully passed at the 155 mph increment.


Indy Autonomous Challenge series results

The results from most of the actual car races, 2021 through 2024, are summarized in the following table. *DSQ = Disqualified *DNA = Did Not Attend *DNF = Did Not Finish *DNQ = Did Not Qualify *DNS = Did Not Start


Dallara AV racecar

For the IAC, a special autonomous race car was developed, initially in 2021 by
Clemson University Clemson University () is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university near Clemson, South Carolina, United States. - The blue-shaded pattern denotes university property. This shows Clemson University is ''out ...
in the Deep Orange Project, and the vehicle was presented at CES 2021. The race car is based on a
Dallara Dallara Group S.r.l. is the largest multi-national Italian race car manufacturer, founded by its current President, Giampaolo Dallara. After working for Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini and De Tomaso, in 1972 in his native village of Varano de' M ...
IL-15
Indy Lights Indy NXT (pronounced "Indy Next"), previously Indy Lights, is an American developmental automobile racing series sanctioned by IndyCar, currently known as INDY NXT by Firestone for sponsorship reasons. Indy NXT is the highest step on the Roa ...
chassis enhanced with computation hardware, sensors and actuators to support
autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defi ...
operation on the racetrack. The vehicle is named the "Dallara AV". The specific model introduced for the initial 2021 IAC challenge was the Dallara AV-21, a rear-wheel drive, powered by an internal combustion engine that produces and has a 6-speed sequential gearbox. To perceive the external environment, the AV-21 vehicle was equipped with six monochrome cameras, four
Radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...
s, three LiDARs, and an RTK
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. The cars are assembled, serviced and maintained by an external company. The development of the physical vehicle was performed in parallel with the simulation challenges and race, in order to allow the teams to develop team-specific software using a
simulator A simulation is an imitative representation of a process or system that could exist in the real world. In this broad sense, simulation can often be used interchangeably with model. Sometimes a clear distinction between the two terms is made, in ...
without the need of the hardware. The teams were required to purchase the race cars in order to take part in the first IAC race at the Indy Motor Speedway in October 2021. By 2024, the IAC racecar specification had changed, and was now the Dallara AV-24—also known as the IAC AV-24—the next-generation autonomous vehicle platform for the IAC racing series. The AV-24 has the same base Dallara AV chasis as the AV-21, but IAC has entirely re-engineered the compute hardware, sensors, and software system to support the autonomous racecar operation. New equipment includes six Allied Vision Mako G-319C cameras (2064 x 1544 px resolution, 12-bit color depth, 37.5 frames per second), a Luminar Iris 360-degree long-range )
lidar Lidar (, also LIDAR, an acronym of "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging") is a method for determining ranging, ranges by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected li ...
system,
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ARS 548 radar sensor with range of , New Eagle/IAC custom drive-by-wire system (
steer-by-wire Steer-by-wire, in the context of the automotive industry, is a technology or system that allows steering some or all of a vehicle's wheels without a steering column that turns the direction of those wheels mechanically. It is different from electr ...
,
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including independent actuation of front and rear brakes),
Marelli Marelli Europe S.p.A. (formerly Magneti Marelli S.p.A.) is a European subsidiary of Marelli Holdings which develops and manufactures components for the automotive industry. The firm is headquartered in Corbetta, Italy, and includes 86 manufact ...
race control and real-time data interface, and an improved GPS interface. An AV-24 updated simulation tool was released to allow potential competitors to train and test their AI driver without having to buy a physical car and test it in the real world. The previous AV-21 hardware/software platform had suffered from maintenance and troubleshooting issues, especially in the fragility of the wiring harnesses, with numerous teams reporting problems.


References


External links

* {{official website Technological races Motorsport in Indianapolis 2020s in Indianapolis Robotics competitions Self-driving cars Autonomous Auto Racing