SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - Undergraduates programmed scale-model cars to judge forks in the road and dodge moving obstacles by describing what they wanted in plain language and letting generative AI write the code, at a three-day autonomous driving hackathon that ended with Kookmin University teams sweeping the top three prizes.
The 2026 SEA:ME Hackathon drew 117 undergraduates in 27 teams from seven universities nationwide to Park Habio in Seoul's Songpa district from July 14 to 16, Kookmin University said Friday. The university's SMT team took the grand prize for stable driving performance and a polished algorithm, with fellow Kookmin teams SKY and KUUVe claiming the top excellence prize and the gold prize. Teams from Keimyung University, Chungbuk National University, and Sunmoon University took silver, bronze, technology, and design awards.
Now in its fourth year, the competition is jointly organized by the future automobile project group at Kookmin University's Convergence and Open Sharing System (COSS) and the intelligent robotics project group at Hanyang University ERICA, with backing from the Volkswagen Group WE: Foundation, a nonprofit funded by Volkswagen Group Korea and its four brands, Volkswagen, Audi, Lamborghini, and Bentley. SEA:ME, short for Software Engineering in Automotive and Mobility Ecosystems, is the foundation's flagship program for training automotive software talent.
This year's contest ran under the theme of an AI-native scale-car autonomous driving challenge, built to let students experience how mobility software is developed when AI sits at the center of the process. Telechips, a leading South Korean fabless chip designer, joined as technology partner and supplied scale cars built on its high-performance TOPST single-board computer platform. Each participant also received access to Claude Code Max 20x, a generative AI tool specialized for coding.
Students worked in the style known as vibe coding, issuing instructions in natural language and letting the AI generate the code, then refining the results. Their missions simulated demanding urban driving conditions, including deciding which way to go at forks and avoiding obstacles that moved.
"Every team practiced on the track late into the night," members of the winning SMT team said. "We learned a great deal turning ideas into working results with AI, and it was a valuable experience."
Shin Sung-hwan, who heads Kookmin University's future automobile project group, said the event lifted students' mobility software skills a full step in a short time, and thanked the foundation, Telechips, and the faculty and staff who ran the competition.
Kim Jong-chan, deputy head of the project group and the hackathon's director, said this year's event was designed around two ideas, applying AI-native development methods and using domestically produced automotive semiconductors. "It was a valuable opportunity for students to tackle the kind of advanced autonomous driving problems that carmakers are actually wrestling with," he said.
The hackathon adds to a strong year for the SEA:ME program. A South Korean university coalition team trained through the program won the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge 2026, an international autonomous driving and connectivity competition held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in May, beating 57 teams from around the world.
Kookmin University, marking its 80th anniversary this year, has designated mobility as one of eight specialization fields under its long-term development strategy, KMU VISION 2035: EDGE, and says it will continue expanding industry partnerships with automakers at home and abroad.
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