SAE International and General Motors have partnered to headline sponsor AutoDrive Challenge™, the latest of SAE International’s Collegiate Design Series.
This newly established, three-year autonomous vehicle competition will task students to develop and demonstrate a full autonomous driving passenger vehicle. The technical goal of the competition is to navigate an urban driving course in an automated driving mode as described by SAE Standard (J3016) level 4 definition by year three.
Throughout the AutoDrive Challenge™ competition cycle, students and faculty will be invited to attend technology-specific workshops to help them in their concept refinement and overall autonomous technical understanding. The competition consists of eight teams from select universities that were invited to participate in the inaugural competition.
Year 1 (2018) focused on the concept selection for the university teams by having them become familiar with their sensing and computation software. They were tasked with completion of a concept design written paper as well as simple missions for on-site evaluation, located in Yuma, AZ.
Year 2 (2019) will focus on urban environment driving scenarios with static and dynamic objects. This will be located at Mcity, a one-of-a-kind urban test facility that simulates a broad range of complexities that vehicles encounter in urban and suburban driving environments.