University of Waterloo students drove away from the first part of a competition to develop a self-driving car with four awards and a fourth place overall finish.
Competing in the three-year AutoDrive Challenge held April 30 to May 5 in Arizona, the WATonomous student team won first in the Social Responsibility Presentation, second in both the Concept Design Report and Mapping Challenge events and third in Technical Reports contest.
Advised by engineering professors Derek Rayside and William Melek, Waterloo's team has more than 150 members, about three-quarters of whom are engineering students.
The goal of the AutoDrive Challenge, sponsored by the Society of Automotive and Aerospace Engineers International and General Motors, is for teams of undergraduate students to develop an autonomous car capable of navigating an urban course after progressively modifying it using sensing technologies, computing platforms, software design implementation and advanced computational methods.