Participation in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, the first race for self-driving cars on a circuit, was reserved for specialized university research centers from all over the world, world-class excellence, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Among the twenty institutes participating in the futuristic challenge – 5 US and 4 international teams – there are two Italian teams: the PoliMove Team of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Modena, daughter of the Italian Motor Valley , which joined the Euroracing team with the Universities of Pisa, Zurich and Warsaw.
From Milan to Modena, Italians on the track
The PoliMove team is one of the few to have accepted the challenge completely on its own, if we exclude support from the University of Alabama in the first phase. For two decades, the university has become one of the leading international groups in the field of automotive control, intelligent vehicles and smart mobility.
An excellence made up of about thirty multidisciplinary figures, including computer, automation, electronic, mechanical and aerospace engineers. «These days we are in Indianapolis to set up the car – explains Sergio Savaresi, professor at the Milan Polytechnic who is at the helm of the“ PoliMove Racing Team ”project -. In reality, the race on 23 October will be the last step in a selection process that began almost two years ago ».
«In recent months, a couple of selection tests have been carried out on an online simulator that exactly replicates the sensations of driving on the Indianapolis asphalt. In the first, it was necessary to demonstrate that they could automate the driving of a vehicle and that they knew how to perform maneuvers. It was a first skimming. The second was the simulation of a real race in two heats, one on one, starting once in front and once behind the opponent. This was a very important step because we had to finalize the software for the virtual race, which we then won. What, in the milestones previous, it was done virtually on the simulator as in a videogame, we will really do it on the asphalt of the Indianapolis oval ».