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

LiDAR lock

Path clear

32 fps vision

of us on the team

competition entered so far

8th

at IGVC 2022, vs. college teams

car, in the works now

Jun

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

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.

Proudly backed by

We don't do this alone.

A huge thank-you to the sponsor helping keep our car on the track and our students building.

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