The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Alabama won the Autonomous Challenge @ CES®, making history as the first head-to-head autonomous racecar competition champion. PoliMOVE competed at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in a field of 5 teams from 5 countries representing 7 universities to win the $150,000 grand prize. TUM Autonomous Motorsport from the Technische Universität München (Germany) took home second place with $50,000.
The rules of the IAC competition required each team to qualify in a high-speed autonomous racecar time trial competition determining their seed in the head-to-head passing competition. The IAC teams raced the Dallara AV-21, the most advanced autonomous racecar. PoliMOVE competed against TUM Autonomous Motorsport in the final round of the competition. In addition, PoliMOVE set the fastest speed record on an oval with a top speed of 173 mph.
“Today was the real birth of autonomous racing,” said Prof. Sergio Savaresi, team lead of Politecnico di Milano. “The real high-speed multi-agent racing was pushed to its very limits. The research on autonomous cars will certainly benefit from this historic milestone.”
Organized by Energy Systems Network, the primary goal of the IAC is to solve real world problems by advancing technology that will speed the commercialization of fully autonomous vehicles and deployments of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Pushing limits for the entire autonomous community and helping to increase safety and performance is of critical importance, not only in motorsports, but across all modes of commercial transportation.
“We came to CES this week, the world’s most influential technology innovation event, to showcase to the world how this competition is catapulting autonomous technologies forward,” said Paul Mitchell, president and CEO, Energy Systems Network. “We’re harnessing the power of prize competitions to attract the best and the brightest minds from around the globe to further the state-of-the art technology in safety and performance of automated vehicles and the teams did just that today with another historic competition.”