For the fourth time in a row, the PoliMOVE team from Politecnico di Milano won the latest edition of the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the autonomous car race which this time was held at home, at Autodromo di Monza in the context of MiMo, Milano Monza Open-Air Motor Show. PoliMOVE competed against five teams of universities from the USA, Canada, South Korea, Germany and Italy, beating out the competition.
Tum Motorsport racing from the Technical University of Munich took second place, whereas the TII UniMORE racing team from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia ranked third. Monza’s was a very competitive race between the top three teams, which saw the Politecnico car as a winner.
The novelty of the Monza race was that it was run on a road course and no longer on an oval track, as was the case in the previous editions in Las Vegas and Texas. Each team had sessions during the race weekend to try and set a speed record at the Monza track.
‘Winning on our very prestigious F1 home circuit was satisfying, especially after the many technical problems we had in the weeks leading up to the race, which forced us to compete with a “mock-up” car that was never used in the race. I want to thank our sponsors MOVYON-Gruppo Autostrade per l’Italia and Fluentis for supporting us despite all the difficulties,’ commented Sergio Savaresi, Professor of Automatics at Politecnico di Milano.
After its debut in 2021 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the IAC took its competitions to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway oval tracks, introducing the Dallara AV-21 single-seaters. The use of identical single-seaters allows university teams to compete based on the quality of their ‘AI driver’ software. In January 2023, the Indy Autonomous Challenge announced the expansion of its competitions to city circuits and entered into a two-year partnership with MiMo to hold races at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza F1 circuit.
PoliMOVE is part of the Politecnico research group mOve, led by Professor Sergio Savaresi, which has been studying for 20 years automatic controls in all types of land vehicles: from electric bicycles to cars and even tractors. On 27 April 2022 on the straight of the Space Shuttle airstrip at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the car created by Politecnico di Milano, PoliMOVE, broke the world speed record for a fully autonomous car on a straight.
