University teams will race autonomous open-wheel cars at Indy for $1M

Nine teams comprising students from 21 universities are headed to Indianapolis Motor Speedway this 7 days to contend as finalists in the Indy Autonomous Problem. The teams’ autonomous open up-wheel cars and trucks will contend for $1 million in prize cash treatment of a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The race observe has long been a testbed for on-road automobile technological innovation, and autonomy is no exception. “[T]he major target of the IAC is to progress technological innovation that can velocity the commercialization of absolutely autonomous autos and deployments of highly developed driver-aid methods (ADAS),” the IAC claims.

The teams are:

• AI Racing Tech, University of Hawai’i, University of California San Diego
• Autonomous Tiger Racing, Auburn University
• Black & Gold Autonomous Racing, Purdue University, United States Armed forces Academy at West Level, with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indian Institute of Engineering Kharagpur (India), Universidad de San Buenaventura (Colombia)
• Cavalier Autonomous Racing, University of Virginia
• EuroRacing, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), University of Pisa (Italy), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
• KAIST, Korea Sophisticated Institute of Science and Engineering (South Korea)
• MIT-PITT-RW, Massachusetts Institute of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Rochester Institute of Engineering, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• PoliMOVE, Politecnico di Milano (Italy), University of Alabama
• TUM Autonomous Motorsport, Technische Universität München (Germany)

The prize cash will go to the teams’ respective university applications to assist fund research into autonomous tech. Everybody’s favored certainly-not-a-sentient-murder-bot robotic canine, Place from Boston Dynamics, will be the event’s formal flag-waver.