UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Advanced Vehicle Team (AVT) finished fourth at the SAE AutoDrive Challenge II for the overall five-year competition, with three first-place finishes in individual categories for this year’s phase. The final event of the five-year competition, sponsored by SAE International and General Motors (GM), took place June 1-5 at the University of Michigan’s Mcity facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and featured 10 teams from universities across the country.
The SAE AutoDrive Challenge II is a five-year autonomous vehicle competition and talent incubator to provide students with hands-on experience in developing and demonstratinga fully autonomous passenger vehicle. Penn State finished first overall in Concept Design Report and Software Specification Report, Systems Safety and Technical Report and, in a tie for first, the Human Machine Interface Challenge. The AVT finished second place in Project Management and Concept Design.
“Our students faced complex technical and management challenges, adapted to constant change and grew into the engineers and leaders who will shape the future of mobility,” said Gary Neal, AVT’s faculty adviser and assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering. “This competition is not just about building an autonomous vehicle; the real goal is building the people who build the vehicle. I could not be prouder of what this team has achieved over the last five years.”
Mutasim Quraishi, senior in mechanical engineering and AVT team lead, said serving as a project manager for the final year of the AutoDrive Challenge II has been “an incredible experience.”
“This year’s results speak to the effort of every team member, and I’m excited to lead this group into what comes next,” Quraishi said.
Individual aspects of the competition were organized into two categories, static and dynamic. Static events were engineering reports and presentations that were showcased to a panel of judges, composed of engineers from SAE and GM. These included a concept design report, where teams delivered a TED talk-style presentation about their vehicle’s evolution across the five years of the competition; a presentation on project management that included processes, team structure, communication models and other aspects of the team’s decision-making and organizational processes; and technical reports and documents covering different aspects of their vehicle.
The dynamic challenges showcased the vehicle in action, in competitions that included custom driving scenarios and a simulated ride-share service that pits the vehicle against a series of environmental challenges during the route.
Quraishi said the team is rigorous in prototyping, creating and presenting their progress to one another for judging using actual competition rubrics, allowing the team to identify and address weaknesses before competitions.
“What sets us apart is how we prepare,” Quraishi said. “Our process gives us the confidence to know we are submitting our best work.”
Participating students included mechanical engineering majors Nicholas Carosi, Mutasim Quraishi, Lodovico De Ponti, Ryan Horenci and Ruthwik Sreenath; computer science majors Caden McBride, Jackson Zaranski, Nikki Advani, Ahmad Darami and Nazrin Harris; electrical engineering and computer science major James Christian Williams; electrical engineering majors Jack Morris and Yousuf Sajjad; computational data science majors Jacob Gavin and Cole Kvasnak, computer engineering major Muhammad Irfan Si; and mechanical engineering doctoral student Yao Sun.
The Penn State Advanced Vehicle Team expressed gratitude for their sponsors and supporters, including the College of Engineering, the departments of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science and engineering, as well as the Larson Transportation Institute.
The team is now preparing for the U.S. Department of Energy and Argonne National Laboratory’s four-year EcoCAR Innovation Challenge.
Students interested in joining the Advanced Vehicle Team can learn more at Penn State Discover.