Alexandria, VA · mostly TJHSST kids

We're high schoolers
building a car that drives itself.

Atlas Autoware is a student team out of Northern Virginia. We started in a basement with a beat-up chassis and a pile of sensors, and we've been teaching it to drive ever since. No professional engineers — just us, after school and most weekends.

Chip in See the car
Atlas Autoware's self-driving car — a sensor rig with LiDAR and a depth camera mounted on an RC chassis
LiDAR lock
Path clear
32 fps vision
~0
of us on the team
0
competition entered so far
1st
at IGVC 2022 — we won it
#2
car, in the works now
Jun
22
2026
Next up — this month

IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2026

We're packing up the car and heading to IV 2026 — one of the biggest intelligent-vehicles events out there. It's a huge step up for a team our size, and we're equal parts thrilled and terrified.

Detroit, Michigan · June 22–25
Event details
Our goal this season

Help us raise $1,500

$0
of $1,500 raised so far
Getting to competitionsTravel, gas, and entry fees to events like IV 2026.
Building car #2A second car with better sensors and faster compute.
Who we are

Honestly? We're just
a bunch of kids who got obsessed.

Most of us go to Thomas Jefferson (TJHSST), a few come from other schools nearby. None of us knew how to make a car drive itself when we started. We figured it out the hard way — breaking things, reading papers we barely understood, and staying way too late in the lab. Here's roughly how the car thinks:

It looks around

The LiDAR and cameras feed in, and the code stitches them into a picture of what's out there — lanes, cones, curbs, whatever's in the way.

It picks a line

Then it works out where to actually go — the smoothest, safest path through the mess in front of it — and keeps re-checking that call constantly.

It actually drives

Last part: turning that plan into real steering, gas, and brakes. This is the bit we spent the most weekends tuning so it doesn't drive like a robot.

Why we do this

You learn a lot more
when the thing is real.

A simulator is one thing. A 100-pound car that'll actually drive into a cone if you mess up the math is another. We wanted the real version — the soldering, the dead batteries, the "why is it turning left" debugging at 11pm. That's the stuff you remember.

  • Real hardware, real consequencesActual LiDAR and cameras, not just a screen.
  • Older kids teach the new onesNobody's born knowing ROS. You pick it up from whoever's been here longer.
  • Show up curious, that's itWe've taught total beginners. If you're willing to be confused for a while, you'll be fine.
The awkward part

This stuff is expensive,
and we're, you know, in high school.

A single LiDAR costs more than most of our parents would like. Add cameras, a decent GPU, spare parts we keep breaking, and gas money to drive to competitions — it adds up fast. If you can spare anything, it genuinely keeps us running.

Help us out See what we built first