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A team from the University of Toronto has placed first for sixth time in seven years in a North American self-driving car competition. 

After finishing in second place last year, returned to the top spot at the , which was held in June at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The aUToronto team competed against nine other teams from across Canada and the United States.

“Through the AutoDrive Challenge, we are preparing the next generation of engineers to head into the industry, to keep pushing towards the challenging goal of reaching Level 4 autonomous driving,” says Tim Barfoot, a professor at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and one of the team’s academic advisers.   

“The team did another excellent job this year.”  

The team approached the competition by going back to first principles to ensure they had a reliable and robust system, says Kelvin Cui, a U of T Engineering alumnus and the team’s principal.  

He joined aUToronto last fall after five years with the University of Toronto Formula Racing team, where he founded the “driverless” division.   

“We looked at what was going to get us the most points at competition and made sure that we were not overbuilding our system and adding too much complexity,” he says.  

This meant pushing for additional testing time at UTIAS and achieving more than 900 kilometres of system testing prior to the competition.   

A partnership with the AutoDrive team from Queen’s University was instrumental to aUToronto’s preparation. The aUToronto team drove Artemis, their autonomous vehicle, to Kingston, Ont. to assess the system at Queen’s testing facility, which features intersections and electronic streetlights.  

“We added radar to our vehicle as a new sensor, so we needed to be aware of all the sensor failure modes,” says third-year Engineering Science student Robert Ren.  

“A lot of our testing time went into making sure that including radar didn’t break anything else in our system, and that it could handle any sensor failure cases.”  

Including radar sensors in the vehicle’s perception system allowed it to measure the motion of objects directly, which is not possible with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors.   

“Radar can help with adverse weather object detections,” adds Ren. “So, if the vehicle is operating under heavy rain or fog, the LiDAR is going to be limited, but the radio waves from radar can help the vehicle see what objects are in front and what objects are moving. This enables it to make good decisions when driving in uncertain scenarios.”   

In an event where both LiDAR and radar sensors fail, the aUToronto system can still rely on visual cameras to perform object tracking. This made the team’s object tracker much more robust compared to last year when the team experienced sensor failure during a dynamic event. 

Brian Cheong, a U of T Engineering master’s student who has been a member of aUToronto since 2021, acted as technical director of the autonomy team this year – part of a new leadership structure introduced by Cui.   

“In the past, it was a lot of work for our team’s principal to keep track of all the systems,” Cheong says. “So instead of having to work directly with all 15 sub teams, Kelvin created groups of sub teams that we called stacks, and each stack had a director.”  

The restructuring and technical innovations paid off, with aUToronto completing its first clean sweep in the AutoDrive Challenge II, placing first in all static and dynamic events, including the concept design presentation and intersection challenge.  

“The intersection challenge was a big highlight for us,” says Cheong. “Kelvin and Robert were in the car, and I was on the sidelines watching with the rest of the team. Each time we saw an obstacle – a stop sign, a red light, the railroad bar coming down – and the car reacted by stopping and then continuing, we let out a big cheer or a sigh of relief.   

“And then we were all silent as the car approached the final obstacle, which was a deer. We watched as Artemis slowed down to a stop and the deer moved by. Then we screamed and cheered, and we could hear cheering from inside the car.”  

“Our success is entirely a team effort,” adds Cui. “It was not smooth sailing before the competition. The only reason we won is because everybody put in so much effort to test our vehicle every day.

“That’s how we were able to get this reliable system across the line.”