Autonomous Vehicles to Race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway
College teams from around the world are preparing for the October 2021 competition with a $1.5 million prize at stake
Thousands of drivers have raced their cars across the finish line at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway over its 111-year history. Next year will be the first time the cars do it alone.
More than three dozen universities from around the world have signed up for the Indy Autonomous Challenge, a race to be held at the speedway in October 2021 featuring self-driving racing cars.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Graz University of Technology in Austria are among those who have signed up to participate.
The race is designed as a head-to-head, 20-lap contest, in which teams must cross the finish line in under 25 minutes. At stake is a $1.5 million cash prize, but organizers and participants say that the real goal of the competition is to catapult autonomous vehicle technology forward.
The teams will develop the neural nets, computer vision and other artificial intelligence systems that will allow the cars to race at high speeds. They will use a modified version of the Dallara Automobili IL-15 racing car, with Clemson University helping to integrate the teams’ AI software and required hardware into the vehicles.
“Self-driving cars have so much potential, but their commercialization efforts are slow; the technologies are still expensive,” said Matt Peak, a managing director at nonprofit Energy Systems Network.
ESN is a spinoff from the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, which acts as a regional development agency for the area. ESN is organizing the contest as part of its objective to incubate emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles.
While autonomous vehicles are being developed by technology companies and car manufacturers, experts say widespread use will require further research and faster connectivity standards that may go beyond the capabilities of even 5G.
Handling the race conditions will push the envelope of what is possible with AI in autonomous vehicles. This will be the first time they will be subjected to the pressures of professional racing conditions, with speeds of up to 200 miles an hour and the need for split-second decisionmaking around collisions. They also will have to deal with factors such as wind shear and slipstream physics.
“To us, racing is a proving ground. It’s the stress test for AI, for autonomous vehicles,” said Dr. Madhur Behl, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who is leading one of the teams.
The teams, which signed up last year, are preparing for a virtual simulation of the race as part of the next phase of the challenge in February. They will use technology provided by engineering simulation specialist Ansys Inc., which is offering a $150,000 prize for the bestperforming team in this round.
The simulation, for which Ansys has built a model of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, will serve two primary functions, said Ajei Gopal, the company’s president and chief executive. It will allow the teams to test out their algorithms on a virtual track. And the data generated by the simulation will feed into their algorithms to better train them for the real-life event.
“We can create, with physics, multiple real-life scenarios that are reflective of the real world. We can use that to train the AI, so it starts to come up to speed,” he said.
The competition is modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Grand Challenge in 2005, where university teams competed to complete a 132-mile off-road course using autonomous vehicles.
Mr. Peak sees this challenge as a spiritual successor to the Darpa Challenges.
“Real students are putting their minds, passions, personalities, energies into this and working behind the scenes in ways that you could not imagine. We have no doubt they are going to be the industry leaders in years to come,” he said.
The timeline is ambitious, with just over a year until the race, but Dr. Behl said that while the technology being developed is unlikely to outperform an Indy 500 driver this time around, progress can be made.
Having an autonomous race car complete at least a couple of laps without crashing would be an achievement for the first challenge of its kind, he said. Future events will build on the progress made here.
“I certainly think this won’t be the last autonomous race that we will be seeing,” he added.