The Johns Hopkins Blue Jay Racing team recently achieved its best result ever, placing third out of nearly 70 teams at the Baja SAE Arizona competition in early May. While the podium finish marked a historic milestone for the team, the car that performed so well was driven in the traditional way—by humans. However, behind the scenes, a subgroup of team members has been exploring how autonomy might someday allow the vehicle to go it alone.
“We’re really passionate about adding this kind of technology to the vehicle,” says Aaren Wong, a computer science graduate student, the director of software engineering and computer systems for Blue Jay Racing, and the lead of the Blue Jay Racing autonomy group.
The Blue Jay Racing team includes students studying mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Each year, they design and build a single-seat, off-road, dune buggy-style vehicle to compete against teams from other institutions around the world in a range of categories, including endurance, design presentation, and hill climb.
The idea of incorporating autonomy into the vehicle was born out of a project in the Whiting School’s Robot System Programming course, which provided students with funding to purchase actuators—devices that are commonly used in autonomous vehicles to convert energy into motion and control the vehicle’s movements.
“Last year in class, we received actuators and learned the software to incorporate computers and microcontrollers into the vehicle. We then retrofitted a vehicle from previous years with radio control (RC) driving functionality, allowing a controller to communicate with a microcontroller that could shift between RC and autonomous modes. We briefly tested this system before things broke down,” explains Wong, who also says he thinks that the Blue Jay Racing team is the only Baja team working to incorporate autonomy into its car.
With financial support from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, the team’s autonomy subgroup continued the class project to provide their vehicle with autonomous controls, while other members worked to prepare another vehicle for this year’s competitions. This dual approach reflects the unique challenges of adapting race-optimized vehicles for autonomous operation.
At present, the team’s vehicles use 10-horsepower internal combustion engines rather than standard automotive powertrains, giving drivers full control over vehicle speed and torque.
“The car is extremely optimized for a single-seat racing dune buggy. Its competition is super high, but the car is not very optimized to be a base for autonomy,” explains the team’s chief financial officer Tyler Stanley, Engr ’25. “Still, it was cool to watch Aaren and his team take a car that was made to be driven by a person and try to make it drivable by computer.”
While several autonomy team members graduated this semester, those returning plan to continue advancing the technology in the fall. While current competition rules prohibit autonomous driving, the team aims to refine its system for future applications.
“It can be pretty difficult work because you need a lot of different engineers and a lot of different subsets and skills. I’m excited to see how the team pushes the work forward in the next year,” says Wong.
This article originally appeared on the Institute for Assured Autonomy website >>