Indy Autonomous Challenge at CES 2023

January 14, 2023 10:35am

Last Saturday, I spent the afternoon at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the Indy Autonomous Challenge at CES 2023. I had intended to discuss it on today's broadcast, but there wasn't enough time to fit it in. But the topic is interesting enough that I want to share it with you in some manner. So this blog post will have to suffice.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge is a global competition among nine fully autonomous Indy race cars (but lacking driver seats because there are no drivers). These vehicles are fully autonomous. No commands or data are sent to the cars during the races. Telemetry data is sent back to the team, but it can only be used for performance analysis and cannot be acted upon during the races.

The single elimination tournament raced two cars at a time doing 30 laps around the 1.5 mile oval track. The rules limited the speeds the cars could go in each lap, but each lap got progressively faster with the final lap reaching 170mph. The cars are capable of doing 192mph. All the cars were physically identical, so the competition was in the software.

The PoliMOVE team, a joint project of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Alabama took home the trophy. During the final lap of the championship race, the car in second place spun out on the curve, hit the wall, and did not finish. But the PoliMove car already had a decent lead, so it is unlikely the results would have been different had the crash not occurred. Although I saw the spin out, I did not have my camera out for it. And I haven't seen any photos or videos of it on the internet yet.

After it crossed the finish line to win, the PoliMOVE car did not take a victory lap. Presumably, that is because the computer driving it has no emotions, so basking in the thrill of victory during a victory lap never crossed its "mind." Following the race, I did NOT interview the winning driver. But that was only because there was no driver! But I did, however, interview Professor Sergio Savaresi of Politecnico di Milano. He oversaw the development and implementation of the team's car. Unfortunately, our interview did not make it to air today. And next week's program will be about the SHOT Show, so it doesn't look like that interview will air at all.

Autonomous racing is unlikely to become a spectator sport, but the technologies it develops will certainly be used in other autonomous applications. Autonomous transportation is a huge part of this year's CES.