Located at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, USA), the Cavalier Autonomous Racing team is a mix of faculty and students driven by the goal of building the fastest fully autonomous racing car. We believe that autonomous racing is the next grand challenge for safe self-driving vehicles. Motorsport racing has always been the proving grounds for new automotive technologies; and an autonomous ‘battle of algorithms’ racing will play the same role for testing the self-driving software and hardware at its limits.
Our Mission
To become the world champions in Autonomous Racing competitions while providing a unique hands-on experience to our team members
To empower our students and produce world class talent in autonomy
To advance research on safe autonomy in A.I., Robotics, and Autonomous Vehicles.
Our History
Our team has a rich history in autonomous racing as majority of the team members have been involved in the F1Tenth autonomous racing development and competitions since 2015. We have strong expertise in robust perception, planning, and control at high speeds, overtaking algorithms, localization, head-to-head racing, and end-to-end autonomous driving and racing. The team has a healthy mix of undergraduate and graduate students from several engineering disciplines. Another strength of our group is experience with high-fidelity racing simulation. We have developed and released several open-source autonomous racing simulators: e.g. ROS F1/10 Simulator and the DeepRacing AI framework to the research community. The team is also very strong in rapid prototyping and racecar design at every scale.
In 2019 we joined the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), and through several staged of simulation based qualification rounds, spanning 2 years, we became one of just 9 universities in the world to reach the finals of the IAC and got the opportunity to realize our ambition of racing a full-scale fully autonomous Indy racecar.
The team has since participated in every IAC race held till date, and became the Fastest American Team in the competition at the inaugural race in October 2021, held at the Racing Capital of the World - Indianapolis Motor Speedway, clock a top speed of 126mph and a 2 lap average pace of 120mph!.
