CES 2022 Indy Autonomous Challenge Jan 7th

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… … ok, NOW we can tell you CES 2022 Indy Autonomous Challenge Jan 7th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway! The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has 1,500 exhibitors including BMW, Bosch, Amazon, GM, Audi, Toyota, Ford, et al. In past years it had 180,000 attendees.

The university teams competing in Las Vegas include:

  • EuroRacing – University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), University of Pisa (Italy), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland) ( Oct. 23 finalist )
  • 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 ( Oct . 23 finalist )
  • TUM Autonomous Motorsport – Technische Universität München (Germany) ( Oct. 23 winner )

To run their $1M fast robots, the university teams selected Open Robotics ROS 2 with Eclipse Foundation ROS Middleware (Cyclone DDS, iceoryx, Zenoh V2X details here). Some teams run Autoware Foundation ROS 2 packages. TUM team upgraded to Galactic and won $1M.

It is not a coincidence that LG’s Silicon Valley lab published Las Vegas Motor Speedway yesterday for the Unity3D open source SVL Simulator 2021.3 and that there is much chatter about @adamdbrw Robotec.AI contributed ROS 2 For Unity SVLSim plugin.

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Are any video streams from the onboard cameras going to be shared from any of the cars from these events? (Maybe there are some youtube videos and I’ve missed them?) Even better would be if onboard video could be part of the live stream, that and an overlaid speed indicator would be make watching the stream even more exciting.

I’m also curious about the amount of communication allowed between the teams and their cars while racing- do they set everything up and the cars take off are on their own for so many laps (which makes sense given that off-by-1 lap error), and are only reporting telemetry out but no commands in (except maybe emergency stop)?

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@lucasw Yes! Livestream 6x camera video & 3x lidar point clouds from each racecar via Eclipse Zenoh to IndyAChallenge Twitch.TV is what I want. We just need 1x private 5G antenna mast setup in center of LVMS infield to have all racecars in 223m to 445m uninterrupted line of sight and no cell hopping.

Race control by IAC race control and university teams is via Zenoh over Cisco CURWB (f.k.a. FluidMesh) 5GHz radios. All of the university teams switched from another DDS to rmw_cyclonedds with zenoh-plugin-dds in their racecars with this setup.

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Mostly I’m asking about allowed communication from a race rules perspective (Rules - Indy Autonomous Challenge - Official Website isn’t that clear), not the technological limitations/solution, but I think this from the zenoh blog answers my question:

  • from the base station we want to re-publish over zenoh those topics with a maximum frequency for each:
    • race_flags : 5Hz
    • emergency_stop : 20Hz
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We just need 1x private 5G antenna mast setup in center of LVMS infield to have all racecars in 223m to 445m uninterrupted line of sight and no cell hopping.

That would be nice.

Is it too much to hope that one team or another has rosbags of videos and lidar or other actuator and sensor recordings from their cars and might upload them for the public? (Despite any competitive disadvantage that might result in) Or would that have been too much data and cpu so minimal or no onboard recording happened?

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6 camera and 3 lidar point clouds is far away from the today‘s rosbag performance I’m afraid.
Would be really interesting to get a more detailed insight about the overall sensor setup, the processing hardware and the data rates that were processed at run (race) time.

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Indy Motor Speedway did not allow universities to publicly share track data especially LiDAR and camera. There is no restriction at Las Vegas Motor Speedway so we can freely share all with community. KAIST team has laps planned for Nov 29th to record cameras, lidars, gnss with rosbag2. SVL Simulator 2021.3 Las Vegas Motor Speedway map was released this week to help. 2021.3 has IAC enabling features including IAC racecar NPCs.

Foxy rosbag2 is broken and unusable for IAC. To support IAC use case, Robotec.ai rewrote rosbag2 making it 6x faster with funding & engineering support from Apex.AI, ADLINK, Bosch, Tier IV. These improvements are in Galactic. There is also a foxy backport available with many (not all) of the improvements, but everyone should just move to Galactic.

We can now share all of that detail, can give you BOM and software setup. Here is a 13 minute high level overview recorded at Indy Motor Speedway:

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