Autonomous Motorsports Purdue

Autonomous racing is the ultimate engineering challenge. Combining the mechanical design of traditional auto-racing with the cutting-edge software controls of driverless vehicles, autonomous go-karts are the perfect platform to design, build, and test the vehicles of tomorrow.

The driver is replaced with a variety of sensors placed throughout the kart. These sensors act as the eyes and ears of the vehicle, feeding the data to a control algorithm that students develop and tune. Machine learning (artificial intelligence) is often used to interpret sensor data.

AMP is a founding member of the Autonomous Karting Series (AKS), and hosts the AKS Purdue Grand Prix: An event where various universities design and build a driverless go-kart and compete against each other. Competing karts are tested for their performance and reliability.

AKS offers a collaborative platform for teams to learn and apply their skills in an ambitious project. The goal of AKS is to make kart-scale, head-to-head autonomous racing accessible to college students.