Among the various initiatives staged on the occasion of Ces 2022 there was also the Indy Autonomous Challenge held at the Motor Speedway in Las Vegas, the first official head-to-head between racing cars “driven” by artificial intelligence. On the track, Dallara single-seater with 420 horsepower suitably modified through the integration of an autonomous driving hardware and software platform.
To beat the competition (five teams from five different countries representing seven universities) was the e-Novia PoliMove team, the result of a partnership between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Alabama, which in a heart-pounding finale got the better of the German team Tum Autonomous Motorsport of the University of Munich, winning the prize of 150 thousand euros.
The PoliMove Racing Team had already achieved brilliant results in the previous IAC tests and on the Las Vegas oval, during the official tests, it had reached the absolute speed record for an unmanned car, reaching 280 km / h.
The recent race, however, was an unprecedented challenge for the teams, which until then had competed in timed trials in a knockout competition. A complexity never experienced before for this type of self-driving car, which in the race had to avoid collisions and adopt winning strategies and actions in extremely short times.
The racing cars used in the Indy series by regulation are identical to each other, including electronics and sensors. The difference is all in the refined algorithm, which like a professional driver must know how to make complex decisions in a thousandth of a second: when to overtake, cut corners, get in the wake and activate any defense techniques.