U of T Engineering’s self-driving vehicle team, aUToronto, has taken the top spot overall in the first competition of the four-year AutoDrive Challenge™ II.
The achievement continues an impressive winning streak for the team, which consistently placed first throughout the original four-year AutoDrive Challenge. AutoDrive Challenge™ II expanded on the concept by adding more teams and more sophisticated tasks to the intercollegiate competition.
“This year was a fresh new start for us,” says Frank (Chude) Qian (UTIAS MASc candidate), team principal for aUToronto. “We have a very young team, with nearly 90% of the students new to the competition.”
Approximately 85% of these students are undergraduates from across U of T Engineering’s departments and divisions. The remainder are graduate students or undergraduates from other parts of U of T, such as the Department of Computer Science.
A total of ten institutions from across North America sent teams to AutoDrive Challenge™ II. From June 6-10, they assembled at Mcity in Ann Arbor, Mich., a unique purpose-built proving ground for testing the performance and safety of connected and automated vehicles.
“This is the first year of the second round of the AutoDrive competition, so the team was required to design, build and code everything from scratch,” says Professor Steven Waslander (UTIAS), who advises the team along with fellow UTIAS professors Tim Barfoot, Jonathan Kelly and Angela Schoellig.