The winning team (Purdue's Electric Vehicle Club) troubleshooting their go-kart during the event.

The Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering hosted the 2026 annual National AKS Competition held at the Purdue Grand Prix track in West Lafayette, May 18-22, 2026, led by the efforts of Professor Samuel Labi and students & staff from the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT) including Richard Ajagu, Hosein Pourgholamali, Deepak Benny, Yuvraj Seagal, Jenan Almulla, and Akhere Olenloa, and Alek Habecker (intern from Depauw University).

The event was organized by the host (Lyles CCE), Mr. Danny White (former Director of Motorsports at Purdue and a motorsports expert), Mr. Andrew Goeden (AKS Director), and facilitated by Purdue Conferences. The autonomous go-karting series, which started in 2018 (and named AKS in 2023), showcase innovations in autonomous vehicle navigation technology, pushing the boundaries of possibilities in go kart speed racing.

In this year’s event, 9 college teams from 7 universities built their self-driving go-karts at their respective universities and transported them to the Purdue University campus for the event.  The teams are: the University of Michigan-Dearborn; Kennesaw State University; UC San Diego; University of Colorado Boulder; Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada), Mesa College (San Diego), and Purdue University. Purdue fielded three teams: Autonomous Motorsports Purdue (AMP), IEEE Autonomous, and the Electric Vehicle Club.

Purdues Autonomous Motorsport Purdue (AMP) go kart. The AMP team Faculty Advisor is CCE professor Samuel Labi. Team mentors: CCE students Richard Ajagu and Yuvraj Seagal.

The Electric Vehicle Club (Purdue) won first place. The 2nd and 3rd place awards  went to Triton AI team (UC San Diego) and Intelligent Systems Club (University of Michigan-Dearborn). The Electric Vehicle Team (Kennesaw State University) won the engineering award.

The event was part of Purdue’s Autonomy Week which included the 5th Next Generation Transport Systems (NGTS) conference (May 22, 2026) at Purdue’s Morgan Entrepreneurship Center. The conference featured poster presentations by the racing teams. Paradigm Engineering (the Memorial University of Newfoundland racing team) won the best poster presentation award at the NGTS conference.

DETAILED RESULTS OF THE RACE

Final finishing positions after 5 laps (max 10 min):

1. EVC - 6m 20s
2. UCSD - 6m 40s
3. ISC - 3.4 Laps - 10m
4. AMP - 3.1 Laps - 10m
5. MESA - 2.9 Laps - 10m
6. KSU - Turn 1 off-track DNF - Engineering Award
7. MUN - Off-track DNF at start
8. IEEE - DNS
9. CU Boulder - DNS (not legal kart)

Teams and universities:

• University of California San Diego - Triton AI (UCSD)
• San Diego Mesa College (Mesa)
• University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder)
• University of Michigan-Dearborn - Intelligent Systems Club (ISC)
• Purdue University:
  • Autonomous Motorsports Purdue (AMP)
  • IEEE Motorsports (IEEE)
  • Electric Vehicle Club (EVC)
• Memorial University of Newfoundland - Paradigm Engineering (MUN)
• Kennesaw State University - Electric Vehicle Team (KSU)

Race History (2023-2026)

Paradigm Engineering go kart team (Memorial University of Newfoundland) won the best poster award. The team was represented by: Amelie Baker, Anna Goldsworthy, Brennan Connolly, Cameron Lewis, Fuad Ahmed, Lucas White, Noah Swamidas, and Steven Dyer.