The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano and the University of Alabama won the Autonomous Challenge @ CES, making history as the first head-to-head autonomous racecar competition champion. PoliMOVE, led by Prof. Sergio Savaresi of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, 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.
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. In the final round of the competition PoliMOVE competed against TUM Autonomous Motorsport from the Technische Universität München, who took home second place with $50,000. 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, which would not have been possible without our main sponsor e-Novia and our supporting sponsors Fluentis and Movyon.”