25TH RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition

2025 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2025)
Calender December 10th - 12th 2025
Location Windsor Convention Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

25TH RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition

RoboRacer Autonomous Racing is a semi-regular competition organized by an international community of researchers, engineers, and autonomous systems enthusiasts. The teams participating in 25th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition at CDC 2025 will build a 1:10 scaled autonomous race car according to a given specification and write software for it to fulfill the objectives for the competition: Don’t crash and minimize laptime.

CDC 2025 will host an in-person competition in the form of the 25th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition. The main focus of the 25th RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition is an in-person competition with physical cars. Each team will bring their own RoboRacer car and write the software for their car. The teams have access to a detailed build manual and can use open-source software that helps them get started with the car. The organizers provide the race setup (rules, submissions, guidelines), the track, and related infrastructure and organize the race itself. For the competition, teams first take part in a qualification session in order to determine seeding. In the qualification session, teams compete in a time trial where they need to demonstrate that they are able to finish laps without colliding with the track bounds at run time. Afterwards, teams compete in a knockout phase in head-to-head racing in an intense battle with their autonomous driving algorithms. Since vehicles and hardware are standardized, teams must develop robust perception, planning, and control algorithms that can deal with the uncertainties of a new track and new competitors. The Racing Competition phase pits competitors against each other on the same track.

Organizers:

Rahul Mangharam
Professor
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
Venkat Krovi
Chair Professor
Department of Automotive Engineering
Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research
Johannes Betz
Assistant Professor
Department of Mobility Systems Engineering
Technical University of Munich
Gustavo Freitas
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Milena Pinto
Professor
Department of Electronic Engineering
Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca
Fernando Lizarralde
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Ahmad Amine
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
Chinmay Samak
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Automotive Engineering
Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research
Tanmay Samak
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Automotive Engineering
Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research