Winning once is difficult; continuing to improve after many years at the top is even harder. But U of T’s self-driving car team — aUToronto — has done just that, placing first at the final SAE AutoDrive Challenge(opens in new tab) competition, their eighth win in nine years.
“We expect both the leads and the members to deliver a lot more than what would normally be asked of a student design team,” says Chad Paik, a PhD student at UTIAS and the team’s captain.
“The bar is set really high, and because several people from last year decided to rejoin this year, we were able to keep momentum, which was really helpful.”
Each June for the past several years, the team has competed against nine universities from across North America at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. Sponsored by General Motors (GM), 2026 marked the last year of the AutoDrive competition in its current form and the final year of participation for aUToronto.
The rules and parameters around the competition change each year, ensuring teams are continuously tested. This year, one of aUToronto’s goals was to improve their score on the localization challenge, one which has them navigate their vehicle to waypoints with a weakened GPS.
“Originally, we tried out lane localization, something that we thought would improve our performance. But after developing the algorithms and testing, we discovered it didn’t provide the centimetre-scale accuracy we needed,” says Cecilia Li (Year 3 EngSci).
“We pivoted to different state-of-the-art LIDAR approaches around six weeks before the competition, which worked, but the approach was completely different. We weren’t afraid of making changes and embraced the discomfort that came with them.”