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

9 groups comprising pupils from 21 universities are headed to Indianapolis Motor Speedway this week to compete as finalists in the Indy Autonomous Problem. The teams’ autonomous open up-wheel vehicles will compete for $1 million in prize dollars care of a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The race observe has very long been a testbed for on-road auto engineering, and autonomy is no exception. “[T]he main goal of the IAC is to advance engineering that can velocity the commercialization of absolutely autonomous cars and deployments of sophisticated driver-guidance methods (ADAS),” the IAC states.

The groups 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 Navy Academy at West Place, with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indian Institute of Technological innovation 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 Advanced Institute of Science and Technological innovation (South Korea)
• MIT-PITT-RW, Massachusetts Institute of Technological innovation, University of Pittsburgh, Rochester Institute of Technological innovation, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• PoliMOVE, Politecnico di Milano (Italy), University of Alabama
• TUM Autonomous Motorsport, Technische Universität München (Germany)

The prize dollars will go to the teams’ respective university courses to assist fund investigation into autonomous tech. Everybody’s preferred definitely-not-a-sentient-murder-bot robotic canine, Location from Boston Dynamics, will be the event’s official flag-waver.