Could The Autonomous 'Roborace' Car Be Made To Drive Like Senna?
The concept of Roborace has been met with both intrigue and skepticism. On the one hand, you can’t help but wonder what would happen if you unleashed a bunch of autonomous racing cars onto a track. On the other, is there any point in racing if you take away the drivers?
But here’s the thing, there will - in a way - be drivers, and ‘they’ will be the differentiating factor between the cars. The idea is that Roborace will supply an identical vehicle to each team, and it’s up to them to sort the software which determines how it’ll drive. Or even who it’ll drive like.
Speaking to Topgear.com, Bryn Balcombe - chief strategy officer at Roboracer - said: “We’ve been asked if those old F1 names can come back into the sport…Like, ‘can you have Ayrton Senna come back and drive one of the Robocars, and then compete against Lewis Hamilton’.”
Balcombe wouldn’t say for sure if this will happen, but the possibilities for the coding are extensive. Presumably you could even programme a Robocar to drive like Pastor Maldonado or Romain Grosjean, if you’re happy with the increase in parts expenditure.
What’s perhaps more likely is that there will be “AI driver development programmes” to tweak the race craft of each virtual pilot. Eventually, the AI driver could take on a driving personality of its own, rather than borrowing from the skill set of a legend from the past.
Robocar designer Daniel Simon even proposes the idea of a future 24 Hours of Le Mans race where each car is driven by one person. They’d drive as long as they could, and then an AI recreation could do the rest, mimicking the fleshy driver’s style as best as it could.
As for when we’ll see these AI drivers battling it out, we can’t be sure. The series was first announced in 2015, but since then we’ve only seen a smattering of public test outings, including the running of the LMP3-based ‘DevBot’ (below) at some Formula E races last year. At the Goodwood Festival of Speed last weekend meanwhile, the real deal successfully navigated the famous hill climb (the same can’t be said for the Siemens Mustang), although it was limited to a top speed of 75mph.
Does the idea of autonomous cars mimicking legends make you more interested in Roborace? Does it make you more worried about a Skynet-style robot uprising? Whatever your views/level of paranoia, let us know in the comments…
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
That idea that the cars could be programmed with driver’s personalities is just stupid. 1st off, no matter how much footage you analyze, you could never drive exactly like, say, Senna. Mimicking the human mind like that is impossible. Then, if you can get a car driving like Senna, surely at least half the grid would just be Sennas. Another thing, if a team as chosen a very agressive driving AI, and that said AI is being way to aggressive, surely they’ll tone it down. Once they done that, its no longer the driver AI driving it, just a custom, boring AI.
I believe that these races, although being really fast due to safety measures removal, are going to be boring af, because the human factor, aka the men that become legends of motorsport and heroes in the eyes of kids worldwide, is replaced by a faceless team of nerds looking and typing at computers. No kid will look up at a programmer as much as a kid looks up at a legendary driver. The emotion of being in the race seat will be replaced with the emotion of sipping an energy drink watching a software doing the work. Sorry for the rant, needed to get it out XD
I think RoboRace cars provide an interesting future. I don’t see the death and replacement of Formula 1 but instead, something for Universities to promote themselves with, to say “look how good our computer science department is”.
Also imagine a RoboRace version of the Redbull X2014, or the McLaren MP4-X, it could be an interesting time attack format, finding out what is the quickest possible lap time for a circuit.
were gonna have to wait for the cars becoming too fast for humans first though
OH HELL NO
It might be boring but it’s a good way to develop the technology
No one will ever be like senna
The scenarios in “Terminator” are closer than we think
Still not sure about it, could be amazing, could be boring as hell, could even be chaos… Geuss we’ll find out during the first race
So now we gonna take the fun out of racing
Seeing the lack of enthusiasm for this sport is rather disheartening. Just my opinion, but I think that Roborace is an incredible concept to demonstrate the leaps that are being made in technology and AI in particular in a fun and interesting way.
You can argue that there is no point in racing without drivers, but look at it as more of a show of technology than a racing event. It is a very unique idea and hopefully it will be as interesting as it seems (to those interested)
So this is the Motorsport menager IRL