Autonomous Racing: DARPA Desert to ABB Formula E

Autonomous racing puts cars with nobody on board onto a real circuit, and the software has to brake, steer and overtake at speeds where one bad decision puts the car into a wall. It started as a research contest in the desert. Today it runs on race weekends at famous circuits. This post follows autonomous racing from the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 through Roborace and the Indy Autonomous Challenge to this autumn's races at Imola and Laguna Seca. It also looks at where ABB comes in, as title partner of Formula E and as a maker of the factory robots that build ordinary cars.

A Roborace DevBot 2.0 in TUM colours on track during testing at Monteblanco, Spain, April 2019. Photo: JohnnyTSpark / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From a Mojave desert course to purpose built robot race cars

Most histories start on 13 March 2004. DARPA, the research agency of the US Department of Defense, offered 1 million dollars to any vehicle that could drive itself along a 150 mile route through the Mojave Desert, from near Barstow, California, to Primm on the Nevada border. The best entry, Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm, a modified Humvee, covered 7.32 miles before it got stuck on a rock after a switchback. Nobody finished, so DARPA kept the money and announced a second race with a bigger prize.

Sandstorm, Carnegie Mellon's modified Humvee, which got furthest in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. Photo: Dan Homerick / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The second Grand Challenge ran on 8 October 2005 over 132 miles of desert. Stanford's Stanley, a Volkswagen Touareg carrying lidar, cameras and computers, finished first in 6 hours 54 minutes and took the 2 million dollar prize. Five of the 23 finalists made it to the end. Stanley now belongs to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. In 2007 DARPA moved the contest to a mock town with traffic for the Urban Challenge, which Carnegie Mellon's Boss won. Many of the people on those teams went on to work on self driving cars for public roads.

Stanley, winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, on a flatbed in Washington on its way to the Smithsonian. Photo: National Museum of American History via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Roborace wanted crowds. Formula E announced it in November 2015 as a championship for driverless cars. Its DevBot test car first ran in public at Formula E testing at Donington Park in August 2016, and in 2017 two DevBots raced each other at the Buenos Aires ePrix, where one of them crashed. Designer Daniel Simon drew the Robocar, a purpose built racer with no cockpit at all. University teams wrote the software for trial seasons in 2019 and in 2020 and 2021, but the owner, Arrival, ended the programme in 2022.

The Roborace Robocar, designed by Daniel Simon, on show at the Berlin ePrix in 2017. Photo: KAgamemnon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Autonomous racing in 2026, from Imola to Laguna Seca

Two series picked up where Roborace stopped. The Indy Autonomous Challenge held its first race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on 23 October 2021, and TUM Autonomous Motorsport from Munich won the 1 million dollar prize. In the Gulf, the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), run by ASPIRE, part of the emirate's Advanced Technology Research Council, spent two seasons at Yas Marina. On 5 September 2026 it held the first multi car autonomous race in Europe, at Imola during the ACI Racing Weekend. Kinetiz, a team from the UAE, won over 12 laps in cars based on the Dallara Super Formula SF23.

A2RL autonomous race cars in their garage at Suzuka, Japan, in November 2024. Photo: Morio / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Indy series has been busy as well. Its cars, the Dallara AV-21 and the newer AV-24, use an Indy Lights chassis, and the AV-21 carries six cameras, four radars and three lidars. In April 2022 an AV-21 reached 309.3 km/h on the Kennedy Space Center runway. On 3 September 2026 the series opened the Grand Prix of Monterey weekend at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Purdue AI Racing lapped in 1:27.731, the first autonomous lap there under 1:28, and finished second in the passing contest behind Unimore from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

A Dallara AV-21 from the Indy Autonomous Challenge shown at the Los Angeles Auto Show, 2022. Photo: Robert Rouse / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB has no robot inside these race cars. Its name is on the track, though: Formula E is officially the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, and Formula E events were where Roborace ran its first driverless demos. ABB's larger link to driverless cars sits in car plants. Its IRB 6700 robots spot weld and handle car bodies, and its paint and final assembly robots finish them, including the sensor heavy cars that racing software is meant to make safer. For self driving cars on public roads, our robotaxi post covers that side of the story.

A NIO 333 car racing at the 2023 Berlin E-Prix of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship. Photo: Steffen Prößdorf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where driverless race cars go after the chequered flag

A2RL says it wants to become the first international championship for fully autonomous race cars, and it goes back to Abu Dhabi for the 2026 finale. Racecraft is still the hard part. Coverage of Imola ran headlines about a crash and about a race decided by a software failure instead of an overtake, and Fox News asked whether fans will care about driverless racing at all. Teams need cars that can attack and defend, and that can recover from a spin the way a human driver would, without wrecking expensive cars along the way.

ABB robots working on car bodies in a body shop. Photo: ABB

Factories care about the same questions of perception and control at the limit. Judging a gap at racing speed is close kin to the vision and force control that guide robots along an assembly line. ABB engineers already plan robot cells in a digital twin before any steel is cut, and programs like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio. Feeding race telemetry or race car parts into ABB cells is only a possibility for now; nobody has announced such a project.

ABB robots working on a car body in final assembly. Photo: ABB

Few readers will ever own a robot race car, yet the work shows up in the family car as lane keeping, emergency braking and parking aids. The open problems are familiar. Cost is one, since university teams depend on sponsors and organisers. Safety is another, on track first and later on public roads. Then there are skills, because each team needs people who understand vehicle dynamics, sensors and machine learning together. If you would rather drive the race yourself, our post on the racing simulator shows where robot arms come in.

ABB's Dynamic Assembly Pack uses cameras and force sensing in final car assembly. Photo: ABB

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