Indy Autonomous Challenge - Daniel J. Gonzalez, Ph.D.

Black and Gold Autonomous Racing car on pit lane at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — Our Dallara IL-15 on pit lane at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Black and Gold Autonomous Racing was a collaborative Purdue University and West Point team built to race a fully autonomous Dallara IL-15 Indy Lights car at up to 180 mph in the Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The Purdue side of the program continues today as Purdue AI Racing.

Daniel at Indianapolis Motor Speedway holding a sign that says PID is good enough

I was the technical lead for the West Point side of the team from 2019 to 2022, advising the cadets and coordinating our work with Purdue. I led the motion planning, vehicle dynamics, and controls for our autonomy stack, and helped design the overall ROS 2 architecture.

Designing a robot autonomy system that can sense, plan, and act at 180 mph was one of the most intense engineering challenges I have ever taken on. And yes, for the record, PID is good enough.

The Black and Gold race car — The car in full team livery.

The Black and Gold race car, side view — Splunk, Cisco, Ansys, and Bridgestone were among our sponsors.

The Team

The full Black and Gold Autonomous Racing team with the car — The full Black and Gold Autonomous Racing team.

West Point and Purdue team members with the car at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — West Point and Purdue team members with the car at IMS.

Black and Gold team members — Going for number one.

Publications

R. K. Manna, D. J. Gonzalez, V. Chellapandi, M. Mar, S. S. Kannan, S. Wadekar, J. E. Dietz, C. M. Korpela, and A. El Gamal, “Control Challenges for High-Speed Autonomous Racing: Analysis and Simulated Experiments,” SAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles, 2021.
S. N. Wadekar, B. J. Schwartz, S. S. Kannan, M. Mar, R. K. Manna, V. Chellapandi, D. J. Gonzalez, and A. El Gamal, “Towards End-to-End Deep Learning for Autonomous Racing: On Data Collection and a Unified Architecture for Steering and Throttle Prediction,” Workshop on Opportunities and Challenges with Autonomous Racing, ICRA 2021.