June 6, 2024 – In their national debut, UC Berkeley’s new ROAR GO autonomous electric go-kart team took Second Place at this year’s Autonomous Kart Series (AKS) race on May 23, held in the heart of U.S. motorsports country at Purdue University’s Grand Prix racetrack, up the road from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. ROAR GO also received a special award for Most Stable Platform design at the race.
“It certainly exceeded our expectations,” says Allen Yang, director of the FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality at UC Berkeley and Principal Investigator of Robot Open Autonomous Racing (ROAR), a multi-faceted AI motorsports program of the Vive Center. “I am particularly proud about our first entry at AKS against far more experienced teams.”
“This is an important win and milestone in our journey,” says team lead Michael Wu, a software engineer at in Silicon Valley and at VIA Technologies embedded with ROAR GO (also a UC Berkeley alumnus, M.S.’22 EECS). “I was thrilled to see our hardworking team effort and innovation pay off.”
As the most reliable performer during the four-day AKS 2024 testing and competition, the ROAR GO team’s special award for Most Stable Platform for their first entry to the national competition “significantly ratifies” the team’s chassis design and construction, according to Wu.
But the thrill of the race is only a part of what’s at stake, as Yang explains. “As autonomous driving is being hotly pursued in vehicle manufacturing, tech, and transportation industries, AI racing has created a fantastic platform for college students to get hands-on practice and understanding of the deep challenges and critical safety issues” he says. Students working on safety and assurance for autonomous systems today could help inform future technology, from autonomous vehicle platooning to space travel.
“As our first time attending AKS, this is a brand-new experience for me,” says Isabelle Hsu, one of two undergraduate research leads on Berkeley’s 10-member ROAR GO team. “The project opened my eyes to the design and implementation of robust robotic systems at both the software and hardware level. I’m looking forward to seeing how this project could contribute to Berkeley’s research and academic application.”
In a nod to the Sim-to-Real value of the racing research, undergraduate research co-lead and Safety Officer Aaron Zhou Xie reports on ground conditions: “Despite all the hours in the sun debugging and tending to the go-kart, I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to work on this project.”
The team launch was spurred by UC Berkeley Masters of Engineering (MEng) students, who developed the hardware as a year-long capstone project, earning much of the credit for the kart’s stable platform design. The five Meng students working on ROAR GO graduated from UC Berkeley in mid-May.
The autonomous go-kart team joins several other AI-powered, motorsports-themed programs at ROAR. The AI Racing Tech team at ROAR, founded at the University in Hawaii in 2020 and transferred to UC Berkeley last August, competes in autonomous full-size car racing circuits around the world. ROAR Academy offers summer programs on the Berkeley campus for high school students, and in turn, ROAR Ambassadors bring STEM programming to local K-12 schools.
ROAR programming and the FHL Vive Center are supported by industry sponsors without which the new ROAR GO team’s participation in the AKS national competition would not be possible. The students, faculty, and leadership send thanks to VIA Technologies, Inc., Hitch Interactive, and Qualcomm Ventures for their contributions to the team’s success.