Rapid Development of an Autonomous Vehicle for the SAE AutoDrive Challenge II Competition

The SAE AutoDrive Challenge II is a four-year collegiate competition dedicated to developing a Level 4 autonomous vehicle by 2025. In January 2023, the participating teams each received a Chevy Bolt EUV. Within a span of five months, the second phase of the competition took place in Ann Arbor, MI. The authors of this contribution, who participated in this event as team Wisconsin Autonomous representing the University of Wisconsin–Madison, secured second place in static events and third place in dynamic events. This has been accomplished by reducing reliance on the actual vehicle platform and instead leveraging physical analogs and simulation. This paper outlines the software and hardware infrastructure of the competing vehicle, touching on issues pertaining sensors, hardware, and the software architecture employed on the autonomous vehicle. We discuss the LiDAR-camera fusion approach for object detection and the three-tier route planning and following systems. One of the defining aspects of our approach was leveraging early simulation and the use of physical analogs, which accelerated the development of the autonomy algorithms. In the process, we established a rapid autonomous vehicle development methodology that will anchor our technical effort in the third stage of the SAE AutoDrive Challenge II competition.