The Cavalier Autonomous Racing team from the University of Virginia won the Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway yesterday, averaging over 171 miles per hour around the iconic racing oval. The underdog team beat out more experienced and successful teams from Germany, Korea, Italy, plus multiple other US-based teams from Michigan State University, Purdue, Auburn University, the University of California, Berkeley, as well as local favorite Indiana University, which was competing for the first time.
“We knew what the car was capable … when everything looked good for our lap we had to go for it,” said team principal and University of Virginia professor Madhur Behl after the win. “Today it turns out it was enough for the first American team to win the Indy Autonomous Challenge.”
The first Indy 500 was held in 1911 and featured a then-stunning average speed of 74.6 miles per hour. Now over 100 years later, autonomous racing cars used in the Indy Autonomous Challenge have achieved a self-driving car speed record of 192.2 MPH on a straight track. And they’re zooming around 2.5 mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway at an average speed of over 170 miles per hour.
Those speeds are impressive, but even more so are the participants, a diverse range of students and faculty from some of the top universities and colleges in the world. Each of them spend hundreds of hours writing code, building systems, and analyzing data to navigate cars around the track. The specially hard part: they have to do it at speeds far surpassing what self-driving systems like Google’s Waymo, Tesla’s Full Self Driving, or General Motors’ Super Cruise have to manage.
There are rewards, however.
“It’s not every day you get to work on a real Indy car,” Sam Huser, a member of the IU Luddy team from Indiana University, told me.
The cars don’t carry a human driver, but they do carry a huge amount of technology:
- LiDAR (four sensors)
- Radar (2 sensors)
- Cameras (six)
- High-performance GPS (VectorNav VN-310)
- Cisco IE-3300 switches
- LTE cellular modem
- Intel Xeon server with 14 terabytes of on-board storage
- A drive-by-wire system
- A 488HP Honda racing engine
- Bridgestone tires
I asked Indy Autonomous Challenge president and chairman Paul Mitchell was different this time in the third year of competition.
“We’ve gotten a lot faster,” he said. “These events are important to win over hearts and minds, and at some point these technologies will enhance our lives.”
There’s definitely been a lot of progress. One of the race attendees told me that at the inaugural event three years ago, one car started the race and immediately made a hard left turn right into the concrete barrier. At a cost of about $1 million per car, that’s not something the organizers want to see happen every day.
At this year’s race, however, all cars made it around the track. First-year competitor Indiana State University, the slowest competitor, still managed to top an average track speed of almost 125 MPH, an incredible achievement for a young team just starting out, and did not crash.
There were a few crashes, with a promising team from the University of Munich pushing just a little too hard, perhaps, or getting an unlucky gust of wind, and ending up in the barrier after a turn. Another car seemingly lost track of where it was and drove over a berm onto the infield, but all managed to complete racing laps at high speed.
Interestingly, the American teams are actually at a disadvantage, a staff member of the Indy Autonomous Challenge told me. While many of the foreign universities allow students to participate on their teams full time and skip other coursework, the American schools require students to still take their typical classes.
There were two components to this year’s self-driving car races.
The first component of the race was a seven-minute track session in which each car could drive by itself on the track in an attempt to achieve the highest possible speed, and that’s the one that the University of Virgina won. The second component was a racing challenge in which two cars were on track attempting to beat each other, which the PoliMOVE-MSU team won. PoliMOVE-MSU is a multi-school team which incudes team members from Politecnico di Milano in Italy, Michigan State University, and the University of Alabama.
The head-to-head race also went up to 170 MPH.
So when will we see traditional car racing with multiple cars on track, but no drivers? Very soon, according to the IAC’s Mitchell.
“Possibly as soon as Las Vegas,” he said. “Definitely in 2025.”
The Las Vegas race is held in early January in conjunction with CES, the Consumer Electronics Show with hundreds of thousands of attendees, so that’s an optimistic prediction.
The Indy Autonomous Racing has now surpassed 20,000 miles of self-driving cars racing, Mitchell says. And autonomous car racing is helping average consumers.
“All the hardware in this car is in commercial cars today,” he says. “We are testing that hardware … we are testing to failure and identifying issues with those components.”
The result, he says, is that manufacturers who are participating and donating equipment for the IAC get better data which their systems can use in real-world situations, such as avoiding high-speed collisions.
