Designing and building a miniature version of an autonomous Formula 1 racecar for safer and less expensive autonomous vehicle testing

Autonomous vehicles are emerging as integral components of the US economy, and in the future, they may be at the heart of the national economy's competitiveness in transportation and logistics. Enabling such a transformation requires building reliably safe and efficient autonomous vehicles and the contributions of a very diverse community of researchers from engineering, human factors and computer science. However, much of today's research on Autonomous vehicles (AVs) is limited to experimentation on expensive commercial vehicles that require large teams with diverse skills and power-hungry platforms; testing the limits of safety and performance on such vehicles is costly and hazardous, outside the resources of most academic departments.

This project addresses this problem through the creation of a new class of high-performance autonomous racing cars that are 1/10th the size of a real Formula 1 car and can reach a top speed of 50mph, allowing for easier, safer and less expensive testing. F1Tenth is a shared, open-sourced infrastructure for the development and validation of new approaches to autonomous perception, planning, control and coordination. The project’s goal is to enable a wide range of experimental research and education in Safe, Secure, Coordinated and Efficient Autonomy. Little research has been devoted to the development of safety benchmarks and infrastructure for certifying autonomous systems, guaranteeing the safety of data-driven decision making, power-efficient perception and control for efficient autonomy, active coordinated safety for large vehicle fleets, and cyber-physical security of autonomous vehicles. All of these are fundamental requirements on the road to achieving the social benefits of autonomous vehicles, and autonomous systems more generally. F1Tenth provides rapid prototyping hardware, software and algorithmic platforms, with full documentation and community support for research and development of future autonomous systems. Learn to build, drive and race autonomous cars at https://f1tenth.org