The Club
Roboracer @ Purdue is a student team that turns perception, planning, and control into lap time.
We design, build, and race autonomous vehicles on the Roboracer (F1TENTH-class) platform — 1/10-scale cars running a full self-driving stack on NVIDIA Jetson hardware with ROS 2. Members work across software, hardware, and race strategy: writing planners, tuning controllers, mapping tracks with SLAM, and wrenching on the car itself.
Founded and run by undergraduates at Purdue University in Indianapolis, advised by Dr. Lingxi Li. We race against some of the strongest robotics programs in the country — and we hold our own.
Latest Result
Roboracer IV 2026 · Detroit, MI · June 2026
Top ten. Only undergrads on the grid.
In our first season on the international stage, we qualified and raced to a top-10 finish at Roboracer IV in Detroit — as the only all-undergraduate team in a field of graduate programs from Carnegie Mellon, Penn, UIC, and more.
The Car
A race car with a computer for a driver.
Every lap starts as software: LiDAR scans become a map, the map becomes a racing line, and the racing line becomes steering and throttle commands — recomputed dozens of times per second while the car hunts the apex and dodges whatever gets in its way.
The stack is our own: waypoint tooling, velocity profiling, and a planner that blends a global racing line with local Frenet-frame corridors and a disparity-extender reactive layer for the unexpected.
- Platform
- Roboracer (F1TENTH-class), 1/10 scale
- Compute
- NVIDIA Jetson Orin
- Middleware
- ROS 2 on Ubuntu
- Sensing
- 2D scanning LiDAR + odometry
- Drivetrain
- Brushless motor · VESC motor controller
- Planning
- Pure Pursuit + Frenet Corridor Planner
- Fallback
- Disparity-extender reactive avoidance
- Mapping
- SLAM-built track maps, hand-refined
The Team
Plus a full crew of software, hardware, and strategy members — and room for you.
On & Off Track
S6 · Open Seat
Boiler up.
Hammer down.
No experience required — just the willingness to learn fast. If you want to write code that races, tune a controller until it stops spinning out, or build the next car, come find us. All majors welcome.