CCRI: MEDIUM: Collaborative Research: Community Platforms for Safe, Agile, and Coordinated Autonomy

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F1/10 is a shared, open-sourced infrastructure for the development and validation of new approaches to autonomous perception, planning, control and coordination. This community platform will facilitate autonomous system research, education and bench-marking 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. The goal is to enable a wide range of experimental research and education in Safe, Secure, Coordinated and Efficient Autonomy. 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. It is also outside the reach of most academic departments and research groups. Furthermore, 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. F1/10 provides rapid prototyping hardware, software and algorithmic platforms, with full documentation and community support for research and development of future autonomous systems. 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. The project's intellectual merit resides in the design and deployment of scaled autonomous cars that are affordable, safe to experiment with, easy to customize, can be shared widely, and that can support a wide range of necessary research in autonomous vehicles. This project's broader goal is to stimulate and accelerate cross-disciplinary research in autonomous vehicle safety and efficiency, at a time when such work is urgently needed. This project will enable researchers in autonomous hardware, safety, security, and traffic to produce high-confidence autonomous systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.