��ֱ����

A team of Old ��ֱ���� University engineering students will face off against 11 other university teams from around the world during the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC) Self-Driving Car Student Competition.

Only four American teams, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were selected out of 48 entries.

The , which challenges students to design, develop, and demonstrate self-driving car technology, will be held July 8-10 during the conference in Denver, Colorado.

“It’s one of the few competitions where everyone has the same hardware,” said Assistant Professor Logan Beaver, Ph.D. “So, it’s all about designing the control system and integrating it with artificial intelligence to outthink what the other teams are doing.”

Now in its third year, the competition includes three phases: virtual design and simulation, hands-on development and a final in-person demonstration.

Teams advancing to the second stage receive a Quanser QCar 2 and corresponding digital twin to prepare for the live event.

This year’s teams will also face a new challenge: maximizing profits as an autonomous taxi service. Vehicles must navigate a simulated city, handle pickups and drop-offs, and respond to real-time factors such as changing road conditions, shifting traffic light patterns and lighting conditions.

The real-time aspect is one of the biggest challenges of the competition. “It has to be fast, on the order of tens of milliseconds,” said Dr. Beaver. “No undergraduate project usually has that kind of constraint.”

The team will also have to troubleshoot unexpected problems, such as how changes in lighting affect the camera’s ability to detect traffic lights. “Even a small change—like rotating a light or sunlight coming through a window—could break the code,” Dr. Beaver explained.

Teams are judged on algorithm performance, driving accuracy, adherence to traffic rules and how clearly they communicate their self-driving concepts.

ODU’s path to the competition began several semesters ago when the Department of Engineering Technology purchased a Quanser QCar and course to support autonomous vehicle training.

Professors Krishnanand Kaipa, Ph.D., and Dr. Beaver from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, along with Otilia Popescu, Ph.D., and Murat Kuzlu, Ph.D., from the Department of Engineering Technology, then recruited an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students to learn the software and to enter the competition.

Although the first team didn’t qualify, they developed the initial codebase that future teams would build upon. “For us, the goal was to understand the system better and improve every semester,” said Dr. Kaipa.

“Even in terms of hardware, there is so much integration of different parts that students don’t really get to experience in the courses they take,” Dr. Popescu added. “It was a big step up for them to learn all the hardware platforms and software they needed to integrate.”

Two students from the original group, Andy Ramos and Ricky Martin Jr., both engineering technology majors, later turned the experience into their senior design project, expanding and improving it for future teams.

In January, a new senior design team composed of mechanical engineering students, three on campus and two working remotely, picked up the project and built on the earlier efforts.

Much to their surprise, they qualified.

“When we found out we were actually one of the top teams, it was pretty shocking,” said team member Thomas Duckworth.

One of the biggest hurdles involved learning to code—a skill not typically emphasized in mechanical engineering.

“Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I didn’t have much experience in computer science,” said student Kush Patel. “Understanding how the code works and actually writing it was tough.”

Dr. Popescu believes those programming skills are valuable for engineering students. “These days, most engineering jobs are interdisciplinary and require some type of programming,” she said. “Even if you don’t use the exact same software, these skills open the door to all kinds of careers.”

Regardless of the outcome, the students gain more than just competition experience. As they work on improving their system and preparing for the event, Dr. Beaver notes, “This is about giving students real-world, competitive experience. The motivation to learn and succeed carries them through, even without grades or pay. That’s a big win.”

2025 Competitors include:

Kookmin University (Seoul, South Korea)

York University (Toronto, Canada)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Kettering University (Flint, Michigan)

Old ��ֱ���� University (Norfolk, Virginia)

University of the Incarnate Word (San Antonio, Texas)

University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada)

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (Chennai, India)

Czech Technical University in Prague (Prague, Czech Republic)

Effat University (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)

National Polytechnic University of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia)

Tsinghua University (Beijing, China)