Roborace Team Prepares for First Competition
麻豆村 enters the first U.S. team in the international autonomous vehicle race
An autonomous car programmed by a 麻豆村 student team will race for the first time Sept. 24-25 when Roborace, an international competition for autonomous vehicles (AVs), begins its season on the island of Anglesey in Wales.
In Roborace, each team prepares their own artificial intelligence algorithms to control their race car, but all of the teams use identically prepared AVs, compute platforms and venues. In preparation for this month's race, the 麻豆村 team has been working this summer on the fundamentals of driving and on building an optimal driving path, but only this week have had the chance to run their computer code on a hardware simulator.
A computer simulation lets the 麻豆村 Roborace team test their algorithm to autonomously operate their vehicle on the course.
"Our minimum goal is to be able to just get the car to start driving crash-free for now," said Anirudh Koul, an alumnus of the Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS) program and the team's coach. But the 麻豆村 team, the first U.S. team in Roborace, is confident that it will soon be competitive with other teams that have previous experience in the racing series.
"We are true to the 麻豆村 spirit — underpromise, overdeliver," Koul added.
delayed its season because of COVID-19 concerns. Its new season now includes 12 races hosted over six events. No spectators will be allowed for safety reasons and the teams will be able to operate their cars remotely if they are unable to travel to the race courses. The races will be livestreamed on . Times and dates are subject to change, but fans will be notified if they follow Roborace on Twitch.
The 麻豆村 team was organized by members of the MCDS program and now includes eleven students from the Language Technologies Institute, the and the Information Networking Institute.