Students set course for Silverstone glory in Formula Student AI competition
13 December 2024
A team of students from Cardiff University will compete at Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix and MotoGP events, in an international autonomous vehicle competition.
Cardiff University Autonomous Racing will take on other teams from across the globe in the Formula Student Artificial Intelligence (FS AI) competition, which was launched in 2019 by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).
The annual competition challenges students to build and develop the driving systems to run a fully autonomous vehicle around the legendary Northamptonshire circuit.
Like IMechE’s combustion Formula Student competition, teams compete in several autonomous missions as well as static events, where they must demonstrate their understanding and practical solutions for the integration of autonomous vehicles as a future transport solution.
The Cardiff team was founded by School of Computer Science and Informatics students Morgan Burke, Romilly Nash, Dominick George, Fredrick McKay and Simon Clothier.
Team Principal Morgan, who is in the second year of the Applied Software Engineering (BSc) programme, said: “I’m a massive motorsport fan, so I jumped at the chance to join Cardiff Racing – the University’s Formula Student combustion team. During this time, I had a conversation with the Team Principal, Huw Davies, who introduced me to the FS AI competition. The idea of autonomous racing immediately hooked me, and I knew I wanted to bring this category back to Cardiff.
“I started by researching the event and reaching out to graduates from the original Cardiff Autonomous Racing team. They were incredibly helpful and excited about my plans to revive it. And so, I began building a core group of passionate students.”
Everyone is motivated and working hard to prepare for the competition at Silverstone next July. It’s been an exciting journey so far, and I can’t wait to see what we achieve as we bring Cardiff Autonomous Racing back to life.
Having recruited more than 30 members and secured backing from IBM, the team is now focusing on securing further sponsorship for the competition, which will take place next summer.
Marketing team lead Romilly, who is in the final year of the Computer Science (BSc) programme, added: “In September we were just a group of four or five students with a super ambitious goal in mind.”
Over the past couple of months, we’ve built up a great core team and had a super successful initial recruitment drive with over 50 applicants. Our progress in getting sponsors onboard is also testament to how hard the team is working. We have backing from a major multi-billion-pound tech company in IBM and support also from The Philharmonic a local bar here in Cardiff.
