Indy Autonomous Challenge self-driving tests ahead of Festival of Speed 2024 record attempt
The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) race team invited Cars of the Future to Goodwood on Sunday 7 July to witness final testing ahead of its self-driving hill climb record attempt at the Festival of Speed 2024.
Working closely with Vodafone for on-site connectivity, a new version of the 192mph PoliMOVE car – the reigning autonomous land speed world record holder – successfully completed a series of increasingly rapid test runs, as you can see here…
Sponsored by Bridgestone and developed by the Politecnico university in Milan, the University of Alabama and Michigan State University, PoliMOVE now boasts a Dallara AV-24 chassis, 4-cylinder Honda engine, upgraded hardware (including 4 Luminar Iris lidar units, 6 cameras and 2 GPS), and a significantly improved software stack.
With safety paramount and weather permitting, the team expects to beat the current Festival of Speed (FOS) mark of 66.96s, achieved by the now defunct Roborace team back in 2018.
Self-driving challenge
Commenting on the unique demands of the narrow track, Paul Mitchell, IAC President, said: “Unlike the familiar ovals and F1 road courses, Goodwood’s famous Hillclimb will challenge the precision of sensor perception, GPS localisation, vehicle dynamics, and path planning in new ways, providing a historical backdrop to showcase the future of high-speed autonomous mobility.”
The event forms part of Goodwood’s FOS Tech strategy, bringing together all future mobility content, along with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning programmes for 11-16 year-olds.
FOS founder, The Duke of Richmond, said: “This year, with our new FOS Tech ethos, visitors to the Festival of Speed can experience the work of groundbreaking innovators and their vision for tomorrow’s world.”
PoliMOVE has provisionally been allocated a slot in Batch 2 on each of the four days. For scheduled track times, see the Festival of Speed website
