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The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team brought home some major awards from the 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition.

Princeton came in first in the design competition, was named “rookie of the year,” and placed third overall among 47 teams, who were tasked with creating a robot capable of negotiating obstacles and navigating with GPS all on its own.

Computer science professor Robert Schapire described Princeton’s team as “an extremely talented and motivated group of undergraduates.” “I am officially their advisor,” Schapire said, “but I can assure you that the project was entirely theirs from start to finish.”

You can check out some videos of Princeton’s award-winning robot at the PAVE website. The judges seem a bit surprised when they learn that one of the team members, Jonathan Mayer, is a Woodrow Wilson School (rather than engineering) major.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski. Pictured above with their awards (left to right) are Gordon Franken, Derrick Yu, and Andrew Saxe.