Autonomous Tiger Racing

Autonomous Tiger Racing (ATR) is Auburn University's team in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), a university-based autonomous racing competition held on ovals and road courses across the U.S., including Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Every team races the same car, the IAC AV-24, a modified Dallara Indy NXT chassis, which makes it a pure software competition where teams develop and prove their autonomous vehicle software at high speed.

Based in the GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory (GAVLAB), our team brings together Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. students from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and departments across Auburn, along with local high school students gaining hands-on research experience. Our expertise spans vehicle dynamics, perception (LiDAR, camera, and radar), localization, V2V/V2X networking, and simulation.

How Our Car Sees the Track

This clip pairs two of the AV-24's sensors during a lap at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. The top view is the car's front camera, and the bottom view is live data from the right-side LiDAR, which builds a 3D point cloud of the track edge and surroundings as the car drives. The car carries four LiDARs, two radars, and six cameras in total, and our software combines them to give the car a full picture of the world around it at speed.

Front camera view and right-side LiDAR point cloud from the Autonomous Tiger Racing car during a lap at Laguna Seca

Competition Overview

Autonomous Tiger Racing

In 2020, the GAVLAB began preparing to make history in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), and we did just that. In August 2021, Autonomous Tiger Racing became the first team to run the Dallara AV-21 autonomous race car around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, ahead of the first official IAC competition there on October 23, 2021. The team went on to compete at Las Vegas Motor Speedway as part of CES 2022.

ATR has kept getting faster since then. At CES 2025, the team won the Tier 1 time trials with a fastest lap average of 163.6 mph, ahead of Indiana University and Caltech. During testing earlier that week, ATR logged a 170 mph lap, the second-fastest autonomous lap ever recorded at the time and only 2 mph off the world record. The team has since taken the Dallara AV-24 to WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, competing on one of the most technically demanding road courses in the country.

 

Watch Us Race

CES 2025 Winning Lap

Watch the lap that won the Tier 1 time trials at CES 2025. Our autonomous Dallara AV-24 averaged 163.6 mph around Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the fastest lap of the competition, ahead of Indiana University and Caltech.

Ride Along at Laguna Seca

Take an onboard lap of WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca with our autonomous Dallara AV-24. Every turn is labeled, including the famous Corkscrew, and a track map in the corner shows where the car is throughout the lap.

Want to see more? Check out our YouTube channel for more onboard footage, high-speed runs, and competition highlights.