

Innovative. Intelligent. Imminent.
Welcome to

University of Waterloo Autonomous Vehicle Design Team
The University of Waterloo Student Design Team Building a Self-Driving Car
WATonomous is a student design team at the University of Waterloo at the forefront in the design, creation, and neural training of autonomous self-driving vehicles. We are proud to have finished in 2nd place for the Year 4 SAE AutoDrive Challenge, an international competition to build a fully autonomous vehicle in four years. For the 2022-2023 year, we are excited to pursue more opportunities, including several research projects, a partnership with General Motors, and competing in the Indy Autonomous Challenge as a part of the MIT/PITT+RW joint team.
The EV Bolt model with our designed competing roof rack

We are currently in the process of developing multiple research projects. They are all ongoing and will be ready by early fall. Check out the topics here!
Environment
Modeling
Environment modeling is the backbone of how autonomous agents understand the world.
We present a novel method for extending the priori relationship graph to include online observations, creating a unified environment model of both a priori and online data sources.
MPC Research
We present an optimal control problem
(OCP) formulation for the autonomous dynamic driving task
(DDT), and a model predictive control (MPC) solution method.
ROAD Dataset
In autonomous driving applications, understanding the world around the ego vehicle is paramount for decision-making. In this project, we explore the problem of understanding the surrounding environment of an ego vehicle in a semantically meaningful way using the ROAD dataset.
Lane Detection and Classification
We explore Wayve's sim2real model to perform perception tasks such as performing detection and classification on the latent space.

Join us in the AutoDrive Challenge
The Journey So Far
Check out everything we have accomplished in five years