CAVE MSc students take part in the UTAC Challenge

I recently accompanied our students to the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry in the South of Paris, to take part in the UTAC Challenge, an annual competition open to student projects from universities around the world. Cranfield students presented the work they had done for the Group Design Project aspect of the MSc in Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (CAVE).

The UTAC Challenge mainly focuses on the development of autonomous vehicle prototypes, but it has a very inclusive set of rules, with a static event that allows for the presentation of projects in the wider automotive domain. Our students were presenting the development of a distributed perception system for urban driving scenarios, relying on I2V and V2V communication. This work was carried out on the MUEAVI proving ground at Cranfield University.

The event was a great opportunity to catch up with other teams about their activities in the CAV domain, and to meet many ingenious students. It was nice to see that several of the participating universities were long-term academic partners, with different exchange programmes with Cranfield. We were the first competitor to join the event from outside of France, and the organisers have been very supportive of our participation throughout the year. This was the first time English was the official language of the event, to kindly facilitate the engagement of international teams. Some of our contacts at UTAC Millbrook were also instrumental in assisting with our participation, so I would like to thank everyone at UTAC for their generous support.

Because of the openness of the rules, my personal impression is that the nature of the event is more inclusive than competitive, and this is a distinctive value of this challenge. Nonetheless, I am pleased to mention that our students were awarded the Jury’s Choice prize for their technical presentation. Congratulations to ESEO for winning this event (a full list of the winners can be found here), and to all teams for their successful participation. We are looking forward to the next UTAC Challenge!