ADLINK to provide edge AI to autonomous racecar competition

With a $1m prize, the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is challenging universities to program Dallara AV-21 racecars and compete at IMS on 23rd October 2021. The primary goal of the IAC is to advance technology that can speed the commercialisation of fully autonomous vehicles and deployments of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).

It is also a platform for students to excel in STEM.

"We are committed to building a comprehensive ecosystem for the C-V2X [cellular vehicle to everything] platform, which is key to the successful implementation and uptake of autonomous driving," said Joe Speed, field CTO at ADLINK Technology.

"During the IAC, the onsite STEM Garage will display technologies that have been at the centre of the IAC from ADLINK and our partners GAIA Platform, The Autoware Foundation, Kvaser, Boston Dynamics, and more."

In the ADLINK STEM Garage, some of the key highlights are:

• ADLINK Technology – AVA-3501 and ROScube
• The Autoware Foundation – an F1Tenth racetrack in cooperation with UC San Diego
• GAIA Platform – tacing simulator robot
• Boston Dynamics – spot the agile mobile robot waving the green and checkered flags
• Kvaser – Kvaser DevKit racecar simulator

In partnership with The Autoware Foundation, Open Source Robotics Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation, ADLINK is working to provide the IAC Teams with open source autonomous driving tools and expertise.

From ROS / ROS 2 robotics controllers to rugged edge AI solutions, the company is a committed contributor to open source, and a proud supporter of STEM activities, upholding its mission to enable the technology of today and tomorrow to advance society around the world.

ADLINK supplies every IAC university team with an ADLINK AVA-3501 series rugged edge platform for in-vehicle computing. The AVA-3501 employs AI to work through gigabytes of image analysis in real-time to cope with the massive data load of high-speed, autonomous driving. All of this AI work must be done in-car, at the network edge.

The ADLINK AVA-3501 combines the latest Intel Core and Xeon processor options with dual-slot full-length NVIDIA RTX graphics for AI acceleration. Depending on the configuration, the system can also provide 3TB of Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVME M.2 SSDs, two 512GB hot-swappable 2.5" SSD SATA 6 Gb/s system drives, dual 40GbE QSFP+ connectivity, and six CAN channels. This is in addition to a standard I/O set including DP++, DVI-I, GbE, 8-channel Digital IO, and six USB ports.

The 21 universities from nine countries form nine teams competing in the Indy Autonomous Challenge:

• AI Racing Tech – University of Hawai’i, University of California San Diego
• Autonomous Tiger Racing – Auburn University
• Black and Gold Autonomous Racing – Purdue University, United States Military Academy at West Point with Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (India), Universidad de San Buenaventura (Colombia)
• Cavalier Autonomous Racing – University of Virginia
• EuroRacing – University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), University of Pisa (Italy), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
• KAIST – Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (South Korea)
• MIT-PITT-RW – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• PoliMOVE – Politecnico di Milano (Italy), University of Alabama
• TUM Autonomous Motorsport – Technische Universität München (Germany)