Our university’s automotive AI club, “KaAI,” took first place and and third place, and at the awards ceremony held on October 30, the team achieved the remarkable feat of receiving the HL Group Chairman’s Award (prize money of 2 million won) and the HL Mando Vice Chairman’s Award (prize money of 1 million won).
 
The HL FMA Autonomous Driving Competition is the largest autonomous driving competition for undergraduate students in Korea, co-hosted by HL Mando and HL Clemove—core affiliates of HL Group (formerly Halla Group)—and the Korea Road Traffic Authority, and sponsored by various organizations including Wonju City, Cadence, and iVH. It was designed to cultivate professionals who will lead future mobility technologies. Now in its sixth year, the competition was divided into three categories—“1/5,” “Simulation,” and “VLF”—and was a resounding success, with 351 participants competing for a total prize pool of approximately 18 million won.
 
The KaAI undergraduate team—comprising Bae So-young, Lee Geon, Moon Jeong-won, and Cha Ju-won—participated in the “Simulation” category, which tests algorithm design capabilities in a virtual environment. They successfully implemented advanced autonomous driving software within a simulator that faithfully replicated real-world road conditions.
 
This competition was conducted using Hexagon’s VTD (Virtual Test Drive) simulator. The students not only complied with traffic laws—such as speed limits and traffic signals—within the simulator but also reliably executed missions to safely navigate numerous hazardous scenarios, including pedestrians, stationary obstacles, and sudden obstacles on the road. Their strong performance earned them high scores, resulting in the Grand Prize (1st place) and the Excellence Award (3rd place).
 
Professor Lee Sang Hun, the team’s advisor, commented, “It is a highly significant achievement for KaAI students to simultaneously take first and third place in Korea’s largest autonomous driving competition for undergraduate students,” adding, “This is a valuable result that demonstrates the students’ passion and outstanding technical skills, as well as the excellence of Kookmin University’s Automotive IT Convergence Talent Development Program.”
 
KaAI is a research-oriented club composed primarily of undergraduate students from Kookmin University’s College of Automotive Convergence, dedicated to conducting research and projects in the fields of autonomous driving, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. The club has consistently achieved outstanding results in domestic and international competitions and academic events, including first place in the AI competition hosted by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS), third place in the CVPR 2025 DriveX Grand Challenge, presentations at IEEE conferences, and publications in SCIE-indexed journals, and continues to be actively engaged in these activities.