Now in its 2nd year the Autonomous Challenge @ CES 2023 again brought together teams from all over world to help accelerate innovation of high-speed automation. This year’s competition was recently held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway where nine teams drawn from 17 universities and six countries sought to set new records.
The winning team of “PoliMOVE” from Politecnico di Milano, Italy and the University of Alabama is now in the record books having reached max speeds of 180 mph. Prof. Sergio Savaresi, team leader of Politecnio di Milano, shared his excitement of having won the Challenge.
“Exactly 365 days later, we were so proud and excited to be back in Las Vegas for the Autonomous Challenge @ CES. Today was a major step forward in speed, in complexity of the race, and in overcoming challenging head-to-head situations,” said Prof. Savaresi.
The Challenge follows the Rules of the IAC Competition that helped establish the single elimination tournament. Multiple rounds of head-to-head passing matches were held that finally yielded the winner in the championship round.
Dallara AV-21s, the world’s fastest autonomous racecars, played the key roles of Leader (Defender) and Passer/Follower (Attacker) that can be seen in this awesome video. A global crowd of CES attendees watched as passes were attempted at increasing speeds, reaching the point when one or both cars could not successfully complete a pass.
Paul Mitchell, president of IAC, captures the passion behind autonomous technology showcased via the Challenge and the platform the CES event provides.
“We came to the world’s most influential innovation event this week, CES, to showcase to the entire technology ecosystem how this program and this competition is catapulting autonomous technologies forward. We’re harnessing the power of head-to-head competition to push and test the limits of autonomous driving to further the state-of-the art technology in safety and performance of automated vehicles…”
While so much focus understandably is placed on the exciting races, another top goal of the Challenge is to inspire the best young talent to pursue a STEM education. Those programs are a forerunner for attending top engineering and technology college programs such as those who participated in the Challenge.
Students who pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Math in their studies are the future innovation workforce—not just in high-speed automation. They hopefully will choose a career path that offers similar excitement as the Autonomous Challenge @ CES 2023.
Learn about another STEM focused competition
