PoliMOVE at 309 km / h
The streak of positive results obtained by the PoliMOVE team continues, consisting of students from the Milan Polytechnic and the University of Alabama; only a few months ago the self-driving single-seater of the PoliMOVE team was shown during the CES 2022 in Las Vegas, winning the Indy Autonomous Challenge thanks to the skilful integration of hardware and software for autonomous driving on the Dallara single-seater.After the excellent result in Las Vegas, the team has now moved to Cape Canaveral, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where they managed to set the world speed record for a self-driving car: after the first test in which the car reached 300 km / h without difficulty, the team decided to go even further up to 309.3 km / h, this is the maximum speed reached last April 27 on the landing strip which was once used for the Space Shuttle.
Now PoliMOVE prepares to move once again, towards the Atlanta circuit where he will try to repeat the feat, but this time on a real track for motor racing.
| ); } The work of PoliMOVE, as well as that of many other similar development teams, will undoubtedly help the automotive industry to develop increasingly safe and capable autonomous driving technologies: in the case of these records, the car used was a Dallara AV-21, specially modified to house all the hardware necessary to make it move autonomously, with the software programming part that makes the real difference between one team and another.
Below you will find the video of the record, waiting to see how the PoliMOVe car will behave on a real car track.
Autonomous race car sets new self-driving land speed record
An autonomous race team from the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) has set a new land speed record for driverless cars, recording a two-way average of 192.2 mph (309.3 km/h) over a flying kilometer (0.62 miles) on a space shuttle airstrip at the Kennedy Space Center.
'Ladies and gentlemen, start your software.' The PoliMOVE race team, a joint project between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Alabama, won the world's first autonomous head-to-head car race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway back in January, taking home US$150,000 in the process. Now it's written its name in the land speed books as well.
It's an odd thought, a driverless car being celebrated for going fast in a straight line – with no human driver on board, it's hard to get too fired up about the risks involved, and the whole thing loses any sense of adrenaline. The same could really be said about the head-to-head race series as well; who really cares if one oversized slot car really beats another one around a track? There's no soap opera, no white knuckles.
On the other hand, this is racing as technological development, in its purest form. Self-driving street cars might drive fairly cautiously, but there will always be times when these machines unexpectedly find themselves at the limits of traction, cornering grip and even straight-line stability. So there's clearly a place for high-performance autonomy, which can develop the reactive and predictive capabilities of self-driving AIs and potentially give a future generation of robocars a few extra options when dealing with hairy situations. The IAC contest has certainly drawn plenty of interest from around the world, with an impressive 41 university teams signed up.
The Dallara AV-21 is a lightweight race car with a 4-cylinder turbo engine and a raft of sensors, processing and actuators for autonomous operationIndy Autonomous Challenge
The record-setting car, a Dallara AV-21 kitted out with LiDAR, cameras, sensors, self-driving actuators, an nVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 graphics processor and an autonomous driving brain, demonstrated an upgraded 4-cylinder turbo engine package in the process, gaining some 30 percent more power than the 335 kW (449 hp) of the previous generation. By our calculations, that's a healthy 435.3 kW (583.7 hp), and the same package will be going out to the rest of the teams, too.
“We were running a car operating on algorithms alone,' said Prof. Sergio Savaresi, team lead of Politecnico di Milano, 'where precision is paramount, and any small prediction error could have created a completely different outcome. This test run was exhilarating, and we are thrilled with the world record, but we’re also excited by the fact that this data will be made available to all, and the industry will benefit from our work and learnings.”
The record-setting run can be seen in the video below.
Indy Autonomous Challenge Racecar and Team PoliMOVE Set New Land Speed Record for Autonomous Racecar
Source: IAC