[AutonomousVehicles] The Indy Autonomous Chellenge tests self driving vehicles at 150 mph

[Cornelius Butler]

Hi Everyone,
The Indy Autonomous Chellenge just finished. Below I have posted the
article link and text to a great post about it from the Indianapolis Star.

Article Link:
https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/2021/10/24/indy-autonomous-challenge-driverless-cars-ims/6162862001/

Article Text:

Indy Autonomous Challenge tests driverless tech: 'Students didn't know it
was impossible'
Nathan Brown
Indianapolis Star
Published 5a.m. ET October 24, 2021, Updated 9:19a.m. October 25, 2021

INDIANAPOLIS -- Never in his wildest dreams would Carl Fisher have
envisioned the day the Indianapolis Motor Speedway would see a drone
deliver the checkered flag to a robotic dog, who would wave it while
driverless cars sped around the Racing Capital of the World at times more
than 150 mph.

In Fisher’s day, rear-view mirrors were cutting-edge technology, IMS was
paved entirely by bricks and the inaugural Indianapolis 500 winner averaged
speeds just a tick under 75 mph over nearly seven hours. And yet, Fisher,
James Allison, Arthur Newby and Frank Wheeler wouldn’t have wanted it any
other way.

They purchased over 300 acres to construct what would become the world’s
most famous racetrack nearly 113 years ago in the hopes that IMS would be
used for decades on end as the testing and proving ground for the latest
automotive technology.

Saturday, IMS was the world’s stage for such a task. The Indy Autonomous
Challenge – 21 universities from around the world, organized into nine
teams – tested the feasibility and reliability of autonomous driving
technology built into the bodies of Indy Lights cars.

Members of TUM Autonomous Motorsport celebrate after winning Saturday's
Indy Autonomous Challenge at IMS.
Four months ago, robot cars could hardly maintain speeds of 30 mph while
circling Lucas Oil Raceway – even with a chase car able to take some
control of the racecar. Teams struggled to have one car stop in the proper
spot in the pits and allow the next car to exit the pits in under 15
minutes. What had been billed in its introduction two years ago as a
traditional race with a packed track, with cars hitting speeds nearing 200
mph over 20 laps to decide a winner, was seriously in danger of being a
complete flop.


Saturday’s competition, which was reformatted into a challenge somewhat
mirroring Day 1 of Indianapolis 500 qualifying, didn’t meet those original
lofty standards, including four notable crashes out of the 11 total runs.
But those involved came away largely satisfied in the level of technology
that was put on display and what it may signal over the next decade of
traditional road car development.


“There’s a long history of prize competitions setting goals that are meant
to be impossible, just to see how close one might get to that goal,” said
Paul Mitchell, the president and CEO of Energy Systems Network, an
Indianapolis-based non-profit focused on the intersection of advanced
energy technology and transportation. “Yes, it would be exciting to see
even two cars on-track at the same time, and we have had them doing
overtaking in practice, but we weren’t at a point where it was consistent
enough to feel like the level of performance was on-par with what we wanted
to showcase today at an event like this.”

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How the Indy Autonomous Challenge came together
Unknown by much of the racing world, autonomous vehicle experts from around
the globe met at IMS days ahead of the 2019 Indy 500, planting the seed for
Saturday’s competition. By November of that year, the first of more than 40
universities began registering for a competition that would involve
complications they couldn’t have imagined. The COVID-19 pandemic made
teamwork in close quarters virtually impossible for some time. Teams
communicated via online video platforms to discuss and begin building the
sophisticated coding and algorithms that would eventually burn rubber
Saturday at IMS.

Through pandemic and funding-related attrition, the field of participants
was nearly cut in half. What Mitchell said several months ago was a planned
field of 19 or 20 teams quickly turned into just 9. Three of those Saturday
were made up of four or more universities, teaming up students going to
school in different countries, and some in different continents.


Nearly 40 students from Clemson University’s department of automotive
engineering partnered with Dallara and ESN to develop the car and the basis
of the technology all nine teams would use. That tech included sensors
monitoring chassis motion, the car’s suspension, tires and powertrain to
make cars pull out of pitlane, build speed, brake, devise a driving line,
avoid obstacles and gauge track conditions to decide just how close to the
limits to push.

Then, after countless hours of testing simulations and fundraising, what
Mitchell said was originally planned to be 20 or so days total of on-track
practice days split between Lucas Oil Raceway and IMS quickly became nearly
50. Some teams of international students, Mitchell said, were forced into
long-term stays in the U.S., made possible by staff from Indiana Sen. Todd
Young’s office. Virtually all the competitors, Mitchell said, spent nearly
every day of the last three months working intently on getting their cars
and the technology that powered them to the proverbial finish line.
Mechanics and engineers from Ricardo Juncos’ Juncos Hollinger Racing shop
in Speedway worked with all the IAC teams to put their cars together.

The Dallara AV-21 car of Tum Autonomous Motorsport crosses the Yard of
Bricks at IMS during Saturday's Indy Autonomous Challenge.

In total, roughly $120 million was invested by sponsors to make Saturday’s
competition possible. By Thursday, cars were still spinning frequently in
IMS’ turns while running just above 135 mph and rain Friday wiped out a
full day of much-needed practice. Saturday temperatures that hovered around
55 degrees – only a few degrees warmer than Firestone’s minimum for running
traditional Indy cars; with frequent rain drops no less – left Mitchell
legitimately uncertain of what the on-track product would be.


More:How and why Michael Andretti is building an unmatched racing empire

Just minutes before Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot waved the green flag
and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb gave the command to “start your software and
crank your engines,” practice speeds that only just topped 100 mph were
being widely praised as a massive accomplishment.

“Indy 500 qualifying is incredible drama, when a driver and team is
deciding where that line is and how close to the edge they can go without
putting it in the wall,” said Mark Miles, president and CEO of Penske
Entertainment Corp. “In a very real way, I think that’s what these
computers are doing today.”

'I was really impressed'
Saturday’s competition started out relatively smoothly, with the event’s
two clear-cut favorites from practice speeds, PoliMOVE (made up of
University of Alabama and Politecnico di Milano) and TUM Autonomous
Motorsport (Technische Universitat Munchen) delivering two-lap average
speeds of 124.450 mph and 129.237 mph, respectively. In what may have been
the fastest speeds run in the first round Saturday, PoliMOVE was clocked
above 151 mph on the straightaways during their initial run.

During the first round of competition, teams would leave pitlane and
complete a warmup lap, two timed laps and a cooldown lap – the latter
involved having to navigate around several inflatable barriers on the
front-stretch to test cars’ ability to do more than just drive solo around
a racetrack. Cars that completed those tasks then cycled back around, ran
through pitlane and stopped would have their times considered for a ‘final
three’ showdown.

Following those two strong starts from the European pair, hometown crew
Black and Gold Autonomous Racing, which included students from Purdue and
IUPUI along with West Point and a school in India and Colombia, failed to
make it past pit-exit before their car crashed with a system malfunction
deemed too serious to complete their allowed second try.

It began a run of teams struggling to compete. KAIST, a team from South
Korea, completed a two-lap run of just 84.355 mph, followed by a group from
the University of Virginia, whose car was clocked at 119.883 mph, but then
ran an unexplained extra lap forcing judges to toss the time. The car of AI
Racing Tech from Hawaii inadvertently took off into the infield before the
entrance of oval Turn 1 and spun through the grass, followed two runs later
by the car of MIT, University of Pittsburgh, Rochester Institute of
Technology and the University of Waterloo suffering a failure while driving
down the front-straight and making a hard-left turn into the inside wall.

Seeing all that carnage, a team from Auburn elected to not even make an
official run after suffering multiple small run-ins with the wall during a
Saturday morning warmup.

Ultimately, four teams completed official runs in the first round, paced by
EuroRacing, made up of schools from Italy, Switzerland and Poland (131.148
mph).

And then, with a winner-take-all $1 million prize on the line, teams
ratcheted up the potential speeds in their systems. First to go, PoliMOVE
was clocked a more than 157 mph during its warmup laps before what the team
believed to be a GPS malfunction caused it to brush the wall at the end of
the front-straight before it ran straight-on into the Turn 1 wall. While
running a more consistent program, TUM Autonomous Motorsport, a German
team, registered a lap-1 average speed of 136.032 mph and a full run of
135.944 – nearly 5 mph faster than EuroRacing’s round 1 mark.

Even still, EuroRacing looked as if it was going to prevail with a
blistering first lap of 139.009 mph that stunned Mitchell.

“After those spins we had Thursday around 138 mph in the turns, I wasn’t
sure anyone would be able to go above that – especially in these
conditions,” he said post-event. “The minute I saw (EuroRacing) turning
140-plus in the corners, I was really impressed.”

In the end, a relatively simple programming issue kept the
Italian/Polish/Swiss team from kissing the bricks. It appears the car was
set to slow after five laps instead of six, not accounting for the final
round’s four warmup laps and two timed ones. Quickly after crossing the
start-finish line looking as if they had the title in the bag, the team’s
AV-21 slowed below 90 mph. Teammates looked at each other, exasperated.

“And that proves there’s no human interaction once these teams get the cars
going,” Mitchell said. “Even if they’d noticed (the issue), they wouldn’t
have been able to change anything.

“It all proves a robot driver can find the limits of a racecar on this
track in these conditions. I think they would have gone over 150 or 160 mph
today, no doubt, if the weather and tires could have been warmer without
this slick of a track.”

Competition elevating community
When asked about the potential future of such an event at IMS, both Miles
and Mitchell hesitated to commit to anything long-term, though the ESN
president and CEO said multiple times Saturday, "I do not think this is a
one-off event."

"We are thinking about what those future event opportunities are, but we
need to get through today," he continued.

Miles even said he'd entertain the thought of an autonomous racing showcase
as a support event during an IndyCar weekend down the line, but both he and
Mitchell reiterated that the focus of this technology is by no means
limited to the work and results displayed on the racetrack.

Just like when Harroun made first use of what we now call a rear-view
mirror in his inaugural Indy 500 victory 110 years ago, cutting-edge
automotive tech isn’t supposed to stay in the racing world. Throughout
Saturday morning’s pre-event summit, tech company officers, university
representatives and government officials (including Young, Holcomb and U.S.
department of commerce deputy secretary Don Graves) continued to harken
back on the early-2000s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
Challenge and its tight parallels to Saturday.

Back in 2004, college teams similar to those that gathered at IMS Saturday
were charged to craft driverless car technology to navigate a vehicle
through desert terrain nearly 150 miles from Barstow, Calif. to Primm,
Nevada. Despite a 10-hour time limit, none of the 15 entered vehicles made
it the whole route – not even close. The car of the top-scoring team made
it just 7.5 miles, and that event’s $1 million prize went unclaimed.

A year later, five of the 195 teams who took up a similar challenge in
southern Nevada (this one 132 miles) finished – the fastest taking the
checkered flag that day in 6 hours and 53 minutes. It served as the
precursor to an urban challenge in 2007 where cars had to negotiate moving
traffic and other obstacles, while aiming to obey California traffic laws.

Now, 14 years later, nearly every new car on the consumer market is
equipped with an advanced driver assistance system (or ADAS) as simple as
lane departure warning systems and as complicated as Tesla’s full-on
autopilot mode. And given the exponential growth of today’s technology
systems, Mitchell and others marveled at what the achievements of teams
Saturday at IMS might possibly mean for consumer driver tech in another 14
years. As the Indy Autonomous Challenge showed, by no means is the present
tech perfect, but it’s lightyears ahead of the first DARPA challenge.

“All the technology in these cars were already available,” said Andrea
Pontremoli, the CEO of Dallara. “Maybe the difference is the fact that we
now, because of this, have the algorithms to use that technology in an
innovative way. Competition like this can enable a lot of people to think
in a different way – even myself.

“Companies themselves would have said earlier that this was impossible, but
the students didn’t know it was impossible, and they did it.”

Added Juncos: “As a driver, I know what’s on my mind and how challenging it
is to drive a racecar and how many things you have to think about. So to
see this was amazing. I’m not even really sure what we’re getting into.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown at gannett.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.
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