The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the main and, between July 2023 and April 2024, the only active racing series for autonomous race cars. The vehicles participating in the IAC are SAE level 4 autonomous as they are capable of completing circuit laps and overtaking maneuvers without any human intervention. Exclusively made up of student/university teams, each team participating in the competition uses the same vehicle, a custom-built Dallara AV single-seater. The AV-21 was derived from Dallara's IL-15 model with the addition of sensors, actuators and computing hardware necessary for fully autonomous driving. By 2024, the series was using the Dallara AV-24 specification, with the same base Dallara chassis but an entirely re-engineered compute hardware, sensor suite, and software stack. The participating teams are made up of university researchers from universities worldwide, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, KAIST, Politecnico di Milano, TUM, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, ETH Zurich, University of Virginia and Purdue University. The first race took place in October 2021 on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), after an initial three-year period of simulator-only challenges, which started in November 2019 as a proving ground to allow competing teams to develop and demonstrate the ability to race autonomously before receiving the physical race car. Since then, the competition has raced on several notable oval circuits such as Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway, and in June 2023 in its first road course circuit, at the Monza Circuit. Over the four years of on-track IAC competitions, the challenge has advanced to include two competitive events. Beginning in 2021, individual time trials are run by all teams over the course, and the event is scored with the fastest lap achieved in five minutes on an oval track. Later, a multicar event was added: a two-car scripted passing competition, with increasingly higher speeds assigned to the lead car, where the two cars "keep passing each other like a game of cat and mouse until one of them has to give up, or they have an accident.” By 2024, the autonomous racecars were achieving top-speeds on oval circuits of 171 mph (275 km/h) and the two-car passing races were achieving successful passes of a fixed-speed vehicle maintaining 160 mph.
Motivation and summary of achievements As a successor of the DARPA Grand Challenge, the IAC aimed to provide a challenging environment for the development of autonomous vehicles. University teams were invited to develop software for solving the autonomous driving task, in the challenging environment of a racetrack, constrained by IAC rules through 2024 that limit only one or two cars to be on the race track at a time, and limit the autonomous control approach to only six camera sensors on the vehicle. During the competition, teams used simulation environments and cloud computing to test and prove the maturity of their algorithms. As the IAC race cars were to drive on track up to 290 km/h (180 mph) with high lateral and longitudinal accelerations, the software needed to plan a path in an adversarial environment and to drive safely and reliably with low computation times. Overall, three main goals were set for the IAC in 2021:
Defining and solving edge case scenarios for autonomous vehicles; Catalyzing new autonomous driving technologies and innovations; Engaging the public in the competition to help ensure acceptance. The efforts of the IAC were initially led by Energy System Network, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit. The goal of the IAC was to focus on the development of a full autonomous driving software stack that enabled perception, planning and control on the racetrack. During its multiple years of operation, the IAC achieved a number of records, beyond the speed records for an autonomous vehicle on every racetrack the competition visited. The Autonomous land speed record, as of 2022 was obtained on 28 April 2022, on the Kennedy Space Center runway, where a Dallara AV-21 reached the speed of 309.3 km/h (192.2 mph) The scientific research from the IAC teams has led to several academic publications, mostly on the topics of automatic control, path planning and robotic perception.
History
IAC Simulation Race In order to qualify for the participation in the real championship, the participating teams had first to show their autonomous driving capabilities on a simulator, by completing a series of hackathon challenges of increasing difficulty, starting from a solo lap and simple obstacle avoidance to 1-to-1 full races. The simulation environment provided the teams with a perfect replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and of the Dallara AV-21 Racecar. The simulation-only competition peaked with the IAC Simulation Race, which took place on June 30, 2021. It consisted of a qualification round, where the teams had to complete their fastest solo lap, with time penalties attributed for violating the track limits. Then, the teams were split into two 8-vehicle semifinal races in order to qualify for the final. In the semifinals and in the final, many vehicles were disqualified for causing collisions with other vehicles, with the race stopped and re-started every time a collision happened. The final times of the semi-finals were used to determine the running order of the final race, which concluded with the victory of team PoliMOVE, which started from pole position and defended its place along the 10 laps. The winning team was awarded US$100,000, while the second place team (TUM Autonomous Motorsport) received US$50,000
Indy Autonomous Challenge Simulation Race Final Standings
DSQ = Disqualified DNQ = Did Not Qualify DNF = Did Not Finish
IAC autonomous vehicle races
IAC at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2021
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