Time: 1:00 PM, January 24th (Friday), 2025
Location: POTR 234
Coffee and bagels will be provided.
Bringing AI Up To Speed: Pushing the Limits of Physical Intelligence with Autonomous Racing
Dr. Madhur Behl, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia
In September 2024, University of Virginia's Cavalier Autonomous Racing team made history by setting a new world record at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - becoming the first American team to win the Indy Autonomous Challenge and reaching 184 mph autonomously on the racetrack. Autonomous racing is about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in Robotics and AI. But why, despite such breakthroughs, have autonomous driving systems not met the high expectations set by many? What are the AI challenges that continue to hold us back? Which hurdles have turned out to be more formidable than expected, and how can we refine our testing methodologies for autonomous vehicles?
In this talk, I will first describe this missing piece - physical intelligence. I will then show how high-speed autonomous racing provides a unique proving ground to test the limits of AI’s physical limits. Leveraging more than a decade of experience from high-speed autonomous racing, particularly with the full-scale Cavalier Autonomous Racing Indy car and the F1Tenth platform, I will demonstrate how racing at high-speeds while in close quarters with other vehicles presents unique unsolved AI challenges. I will recount our journey from the lab to lap times, and the rigorous engineering required to develop an autonomous racing car from scratch. Despite progress, autonomous racing has yet to match expert racing drivers’ skills or navigate the chaos of dense, multi-car racing in the real world; indicating that several more laps are needed on our journey towards artificial general “driving” intelligence.
Dr. Madhur Behl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. He is the team principal for UVA’s Cavalier Autonomous Racing team – the first American team to win the Indy Autonomous Challenge (2024). Dr. Behl also co-founded the F1Tenth autonomous racing platform and International F1tenth grand prix competitions in 2015. He received his Ph.D. (2015) and M.S. (2012), in Electrical and Systems Engineering, both from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Behl is an IEEE Senior Member and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He holds editorial positions for the Journal of Field Robotics, and the SAE Journal on Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, and the ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. He also serves on the Academic Advisory Council of the Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) campaign, to help promote public understanding about autonomous vehicles and their potential societal benefits.