Student autonomous racing team beats own record

Friday, June 23, 2023

A multi-school autonomous racing team that includes University of Waterloo students from across campus achieved a personal best speed of 173.8 kph at a race on the Monza F1 Circuit in Milan, Italy.

The race, which featured five teams with members from universities around the world, was the Waterloo students’ fifth race and the first on a road course rather than a banked oval track.

The Italian race is the latest competition in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, a collaboration between public-private organizers and academic institutions created in 2019 to challenge university students to invent a “new generation of automated vehicle software” in order “to run fully autonomous racecars.” Every team purchases the same multi-million dollar car – the Dallara AV-21 – and then competes to create the best software to drive it.

The racing team MIT-PITT-RW is made up of more than sixty students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pittsburgh, the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Waterloo.

It is the only team made up primarily of undergraduate students and is funded entirely through sponsorship. The students are split into groups, each focusing on designing and programming a different aspect of the car’s operation.

Ten current team members are from the University of Waterloo: Ishan Baliyan (bachelor's in Computer Science), Evelyn Campbell (bachelor's in Computer Engineering), Eidan Erlich (bachelor's in Mechatronics Engineering), Connor Kirby (bachelor's in Business Administration and Mathematics double degree), Ryan Larkin (bachelor's in Computer Science), John Liu (master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering), Brian Mao (master’s in Applied Math and Computer Science), Jatin Mehta (bachelor's in Computer Science), Bilal Nasar (bachelor's in Computing and Financial Management) and Andre Slavescu (bachelor's in Computer Science).

Go to Autonomous racing team achieves personal best in Italian race for the full story.