North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University announced recently that the College of Engineering Autonomous Auto team (A3) finished second overall and first in the country in the SAE Autodrive Challenge.

In this year’s competition, the car’s ability to navigate in urban environment driving scenarios, in the presence of static and dynamic objects, was tested and scored at a one-of-a-kind urban test facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“You’re talking about students coming together with limited resources and budgets. Some of our team members  quickly ramped up; taking a regular car, outfitting it with sensors and building their own algorithms and software from scratch,” said Kareem Hogan, electrical engineering Ph.D. Candidate, and A3 team co-captain. “The A3 car innovations were all hand-built. Not outsourced. The coding and fingerprints were all done by students of N.C. A&T.”

N.C. A&T team competed against Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Michigan State University, Michigan Technical University, Texas A&M University, and others.