Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Johannes Betz, University of Pennsylvania, “Autonomous Handling at the Limits – Winning the Indy Autonomous Challenge”

*This will be a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and Virtual attendance via Zoom

The rising popularity of self-driving cars has led to the creation of an additional research and development branch in the recent years: Autonomous racing. Researchers are developing algorithms and hardware for high performance race vehicles which aim to operate autonomously on the edge of the vehicles limits: High speeds, high accelerations, high computation power, low reaction time, adversarial environments. In addition, with an increasing number of competitions in the field of autonomous racing, researchers have the platforms to test their high performance algorithms. This talk will give an overview of the current efforts in the field, the main research outcomes and the open challenges we can solve with the help of autonomous Racing. Especially we will focus on the Indy Autonomous Challenge and the the software setup of the TUM Autonomous Motorsports Team – the winning team of the Indy Autonomous Challenge. A detailed look into the software will show how each software module is connected and how we can achieve high speed autonomous driving on the racetrack.