Kookmin University students swept an autonomous driving hackathon held at Park Habio in Seoul’s Songpa District July 14-16, winning the top three prizes.

The university said Friday that its SMT team took the grand prize by demonstrating stable driving performance and highly sophisticated algorithms at the 2026 SEA:ME Hackathon.

Two other teams, SKY and KUUVe, won the top excellence award and the gold prize, respectively.

Teams from Keimyung University, Chungbuk National University and Sun Moon University earned silver, bronze, technical and design awards.

Now in its fourth year, the SEA:ME Hackathon is an inter-university competition jointly organized by Kookmin University’s Convergence and Open Sharing System (COSS) Future Mobility Project Group and Hanyang University’s ERICA Intelligent Robotics Project Group, with support from the Volkswagen Group WE: Foundation.

SEA:ME stands for Software Engineering in Automotive and Mobility Ecosystems.

Designed to cultivate experts with practical expertise in future mobility and mobility software, this year’s competition brought together 117 undergraduate students from 27 teams representing seven universities across the country to showcase their autonomous driving technologies and innovative ideas.

Under the theme, “AI-Native Scale Car Autonomous Driving Challenge,” the event offered participants hands-on experience in developing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven mobility software by integrating AI into real-world autonomous driving development.

Telechips, one of Korea’s leading fabless semiconductor companies, participated as the technical partner, providing scale cars built on its high-performance TOPST single-board computer (SBC) platform. TOPST is short for total open platform for system development and training.

Participants were also given access to Claude Code Max 20x, a generative AI coding assistant designed for software development.

Using the emerging “vibe coding” approach, which generates code from natural language prompts, participants completed advanced missions simulating real-world urban driving scenarios, including navigating intersections and avoiding dynamic obstacles.

Through the challenge, participants gained hands-on experience in next-generation mobility software development, learning to collaborate with AI to solve complex problems beyond conventional coding.

Members of the SMT team said they learned a great deal and gained valuable experience through using AI to turn ideas into tangible outcomes.

“This was a meaningful competition that enabled students to significantly enhance their mobility software capabilities in a short period of time,” said Shin Sung-hwan, director of the COSS Future Mobility Consortium.

“I hope that the three-day experience will serve as a solid foundation for the students as they pursue their future careers.”

“The hackathon was designed around two key themes: the application of AI-based development methodologies and the utilization of domestically developed automotive semiconductors,” said Kim Jong-chan, deputy head of the mobility consortium, who oversaw the competition.

“The event provided students with a valuable opportunity to directly tackle advanced autonomous driving challenges that are being actively addressed by automotive companies in real-world development environments."

Celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, Kookmin University has designated mobility as one of eight specialization fields under its “KMU VISION 2035: EDGE.”

EDGE represents four core values: entrepreneurship, digital transformation, global competency and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance).