In October 2021, a modified Dallara-15 Indy Lights racecar programmed by MIT DriverLess will hit the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway at speeds of up to 180 mph. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the world’s first head-to-head, high-speed autonomous race. It offers the team a chance to grab a piece of the $1.5 million purse while out-maneuvering fellow university innovators on what is arguably the most iconic racecourse.
But the IAC has implications beyond the track. Stakeholders for the event include Sebastian Thrun, a former winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and Reilly Brennan, who is a lecturer at Stanford’s Center for Automotive Research and a partner at Trucks Venture Capital. The hosts are well aware that, much like the DARPA grand challenge, the IAC has the potential to catalyze a new wave of innovation in the private sector.
Formed in 2018 and hosted by the Edgerton Center at MIT, MIT DriverLess is comprised of 50 highly motivated engineers with diverse skill sets. The team is intent on learning by doing, pushing the boundaries of the autonomous driving field. "There is so much strategy involved in multiagent autonomous racing, from reinforcement learning to AI and game theory," says Systems Architecture Lead and Chief Engineer Nick Stathas. "What excites us the most is coming up with our own approaches to problems in autonomous driving—we're looking to define state-of the-art solutions."
What excites us the most is coming up with our own approaches to problems in autonomous driving—we're looking to define state-of the-art solutions.
In the lead up to the big day, the team has been testing their algorithms at hackathons and competing in a championship series called RoboRace. The series features twelve races hosted over six events covered by Livestream. In this format, MIT DriverLess and their competitors program and race a sleek electric vehicle dubbed the DEVBot 2.0. Reminiscent of a Tesla Roadster, the DEVBot was designed specifically to explore the relationship between man and machine.
The twist is that RoboRace blends the physical world with a virtual world dubbed the Metaverse. Teams must traverse the track while interacting with an augmented reality replete with virtual obstacles that raise lap times and collectibles that lower them. “Think of it as real-life racing meets MarioKart,” says Kylie Ying, who works in the Path Planning division at MIT DriverLess.
For this challenge, Ying and her teammates have developed a unique planning algorithm they call Spline Racer, which determines if and when their vehicle needs to deviate from the most expedient course around the track to avoid obstacles or collect rewards. “Spline Racer essentially computes potential paths and then chooses the best one to take based on total time to negotiate the path and total cost or reward from bumping into obstacles or collectibles along that path,” explains Ying.
MIT is home to cutting-edge research that benefits MIT DriverLess whenever the checkered flag is waved. World-renowned roboticist Daniela Rus is just one of their trusted advisors. Rus is Director of MIT's Computer and Science Laboratory (CSAIL), the Associate Director of MIT's Quest for Intelligence Core, and Director of the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center, which focuses on the advancement of AI research and its applications to intelligent vehicles.
