Panel reflects on prep for October’s Indy Autonomous Challenge

August 18, 2021 | Amy French

Fans of speed and autonomy have an unprecedented treat coming Oct. 23, when 29 teams of college students will race freshly designed autonomous cars in the Indy Autonomous Challenge for $1.5 million in prizes, including $1 million for the first-place finisher.The cars are capable of going an estimated 180 mph, according to panelists in a Wednesday keynote that offered stories from behind the scenes of two years of event preparation.

Panelist Chris Paredis, who teaches automotive engineering at Clemson University, described the excitement of joining the project near its inception. Paradis is the BMW Endowed Chair in Automotive Systems Integration and Function at Clemson, which involves leading a program called Deep Orange. In that program, students design and build concept vehicles.

“Clemson was one of the universities to step forward to say, ‘We may not be the best at writing software for this vehicle, but we have this unique program called Deep Orange …”

About 40 Deep Orange students, all master’s degree candidates, developed the platform that all teams will use, starting with a Dallara chassis, Paredis said. Teams will use identical cars, with software that they customize.

Panelist Sandeep Sovani, an autonomous vehicles expert who worked more than 20years at simulation software giant Ansys, showed early simulation video in which cars were colliding right and left.

The competitors, which represented universities from North and South America, Europe, and Asia, had already had to submit white papers and videos explaining their capabilities in order to qualify. But simulation leveled up the intensity of the experience and heightened understanding of the difficulty.

“They were driving in the virtual driving range like pros toward the end (of the simulation phase),” Sovani said. “And they got to get a lot of the flaws out of their software through simulation.”

Sovani emphasized the importance of simulation, explaining that creating an autonomous vehicle can require 8 million miles of testing – an impossible distance on real-world roads. “Eight million miles, by the way, is like driving to the end of the solar system, you know, to Pluto and back.”

Panelist Justin Puent, a senior project manager with event sponsor Hexagon, couldn’t stop grinning as he described the excitement of “shoehorning” all of the technology into cockpits that would never hold human drivers.

“You don’t realize how smile they are – I mean, this high off the ground,” he said, gesturing to his knees.

Panelist Noel Marshall, a mechanical engineer who has worked on prototype vehicles for about 10 years and is a senior account executive for Schaeffler, described the attention given to ensuring safety. She said the cars have three processors that constantly monitor input, deciding which signals are most valid and putting those through to actual routers, each of which have two motors.

Currently, teams are going through final vehicle preparation and track practices in Indianapolis. Panelist moderator Bobby Hamburg forecast that the experience would change their lives.

“I’m sure none of them will have trouble getting hired after this,” Hamburg said.