Indy Autonomous Challenge

The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the main and, between July 2023 and April 2024, the only active racing series for autonomous race cars. The vehicles participating in the IAC are SAE level 4 autonomous as they are capable of completing circuit laps and overtaking maneuvers without any human intervention.

Exclusively made up of student/university teams, each team participating in the competition uses the same vehicle, a custom-built Dallara AV single-seater. The AV-21 was derived from Dallara's IL-15 model with the addition of sensors, actuators and computing hardware necessary for fully autonomous driving. By 2024, the series was using the Dallara AV-24 specification, with the same base Dallara chassis but an entirely re-engineered compute hardware, sensor suite, and software stack. The participating teams are made up of university researchers from universities worldwide, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, KAIST, Politecnico di Milano, TUM, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, ETH Zurich, University of Virginia and Purdue University.

The first race took place in October 2021 on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), after an initial three-year period of simulator-only challenges, which started in November 2019 as a proving ground to allow competing teams to develop and demonstrate the ability to race autonomously before receiving the physical race car. Since then, the competition has raced on several notable oval circuits such as Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway, and in June 2023 in its first road course circuit, at the Monza Circuit.

Over the four years of on-track IAC competitions, the challenge has advanced to include two competitive events. Beginning in 2021, individual time trials are run by all teams over the course, and the event is scored with the fastest lap achieved in five minutes on an oval track. Later, a multicar event was added: a two-car scripted passing competition, with increasingly higher speeds assigned to the lead car, where the two cars "keep passing each other like a game of cat and mouse until one of them has to give up, or they have an accident.”

By 2024, the autonomous racecars were achieving top-speeds on oval circuits of 171 mph (275 km/h) and the two-car passing races were achieving successful passes of a fixed-speed vehicle maintaining 160 mph.