(photo courtesy of Matthew Lavere)
U of T self-driving car team takes top spot at AutoDrive Challenge II
Published: September 22, 2025
The University of Toronto’s self-driving car team, aUToronto, has taken top spot at the AutoDrive Challenge II competition.
The competition invites 10 university teams from across North America to develop and demonstrate autonomous vehicles that can navigate urban driving. It is held at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. each June.
The aUToronto team finished 150 points ahead of second place, securing the top spot for the seventh time in eight years. Additionally, a paper about a custom algorithm developed for the planning and controls portion of the competition was presented at the 2025 Conference on Robotics and Vision – Canada’s top conference on AI-robotics innovation. The work focuses on autonomous driving in busy urban environments by unifying path planning and vehicle control into a single framework.
“We’re always proud of the team, but to see them improve so much from year to year and for their hard work to be accepted for a conference publication really shows how beneficial club work can be for students’ professional goals,” says Tim Barfoot, professor in the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and an academic advisor to the aUToronto team.
