The Indy Autonomous Challenge lands in Monza
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vegas – Algorithmic-driven, unmanned vehicles that whiz by at lightning speed as they battle it out to the last corner on the historic Monza circuit. It may sound like science fiction, but instead it’s just the precise description of what will happen in the middle of this year, from 16 to 18 June, when the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the competition that since 2019 has seen self-driving racing cars compete , will arrive in Italy as a guest of MiMo, the Milano Monza Motor Show.
This was announced by the president of IAC Paul Mitchell together with the president of MiMo Andrea Levy at CES in LAS Vegas, the largest consumer electronics trade show in the world, where, among other things, on January 7th a new competition will take place between the racing cars driven by algorithms (also visible live on Twitch).
“We have three goals,” Mitchell explained. “The first is to advance the technologies underlying driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. The second is to find and involve the best minds globally, then have them collaborate so that together they contribute to the development of AI, sensors and everything needed for an autonomous car. Finally – concludes the IAC president – our third objective is to conquer the minds and hearts of the general public, so that people learn to trust these technologies».
Meanwhile, the landing at Monza represents a passage of extraordinary importance for the competition: firstly, because it will be the first time that the cars compete not on an oval circuit, but «on the integral Formula 1 track, where there are treacherous chicanes, where the cars accelerate up to 300 per hour and then brake up to 60 – recalls the president of MiMo Andrea Levy – and where, in the parabolic curve dedicated to Michele Alboreto, the Indy race cars can undergo up to 4g of lateral acceleration». In short, a more difficult and complex test than in the past, and which for this very reason testifies to the degree of maturity of these autonomous racing cars.
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Competition itself, after all, is not entirely new. In fact, the IAC collects the legacy of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a race between autonomous vehicles created in the 2000s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: the same US agency responsible for the development of military technologies, which over the decades has distinguished itself for innovative projects such as ARPANET, the first computer network developed in 1969 in collaboration with American universities.
However, it seems like a lifetime ago from the first Grand Challenge in 2004, when none of the entered vehicles managed to do more than 7 of the 150 miles scheduled for the course. In fact, nothing to do with today’s autonomous racing cars, which in the last race of 2021 raced at 300 kilometers per hour on the Texas Motor Speedway track: there were 21 teams of over 500 university students from 39 universities of 11 Villages.
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And there was also a lot of Italy: to represent it – moreover by winning the competition for the second consecutive time – there was first of all the PoliMOVE team of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, led by Professor Sergio Savaresi, who for years has stood out for his work in the fields of automotive control, intelligent vehicles and smart mobility. And which, for example, holds the world speed record for a self-driving car: 278.4 km/h.
«It is the first time that the competition has come out of the United States, and also in this case it will be associated with a pre-existing event capable of attracting the general public – explains Savaresi, also present at CES – We will arrive in Italy in March to start testing cars even on smaller circuits».
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Then the cars are also Italian: all the autonomous racecars are Dallara and are all the same, in terms of components and basic software. And Italian is also Fluidmesh, the company that created all the communication technology for cars, then acquired by Cisco in 2020 precisely to create the last championship in Texas.
What changes are the AI algorithms developed by each team, in a competition that starts from the speed of the vehicles, from their ability to manage themselves in extreme situations, to administer cornering acceleration and braking to the limit, to culminate in the comparison between the most intelligent software .
The importance of the code is also underlined by the fact that, as happens for example for the electric car competition in Formula E, the teams are not allowed to make any mechanical, aerodynamic or engine modifications, while the electronics and sensors.
A car race in which it is not so much the power of the engine that wins as that of the artificial intelligence, and also then the ideal terrain on which to test the components to evaluate their resistance and reliability: «What we do above all is to push these technologies to the limit to see how they behave – concludes Savaresi – when, for example, the components are subjected to much higher speeds and vibrations than usual, or when the software has to make decisions at 280 kilometers per hour». If it performs well in that case, then there’s a good chance the AI will be reliable even when the car is going 50km per hour.
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