Roborace Just Revealed What Its Driverless Race Cars Will Look Like
When Formula E first announced that it would have an autonomous racing support series, motorsport fans were understandably skeptical. To get people excited about the racing, Roborace hired Daniel Simon, the man behind the iconic Light Cycle from 2010’s Tron: Legacy, to create a unique design unlike anything racing had ever seen; it’s completely driverless and will race using real-time computer algorithms and the latest AI technologies.
“My goal was to create a vehicle that takes full advantage of the unusual opportunities of having no driver without ever compromising on beauty,” he said. “Racing engineers and aerodynamicists have worked with me from the beginning to strike that balance”.
As for the performance of the all-electric cars, Dennis Sverdlov, the founder of Kinetik, the company behind Roborace, told Wired that the cars will reach speeds in excess of 186mph.
Roborace will be a support series for the 2016/2017 Formula E season, where 10 teams of two cars will compete in hour-long races over the full championship. The good news for those looking to get into motorsport is one team will be a crowd-sourced community team for software engineers and tech experts.
Comments
I think its a fantastic idea, but would hesitate to call it ‘Motorsport’, rather ‘Engineeringsport’. I’m doing a PhD in Systems and control engineering, so this intrigues me quite a lot. The same way F1 has driven automotive innovation that ‘trickled’ into the road cars, this could be a similar platform for novel control algorithms and intelligence. Naturally, we’re not keen on driverless cars for ourselves, but control algorithms can be applied to any vehicle: it could mean driverless goods transport, making the products on our shelves cheaper. I think anything that drives innovation should be given a chance. Feel free to disagree, this is just one man’s opinion!
There’s literally no point in racing if there’s no one driving…
Way to go! First we weaponised a food blender, now we inject a cleaning robot with petrol
I saw the drivers of the cars
Makes me want to watch World Race and Acceleracers again. My childhood in a nutshell
And this will be interesting/exciting how??
Fck this Sht
You had me “Roborace”
So it’s a competition of who has the best AI?
if every car is running perfect laps due to being computer controlled/no human error, there will be no overtaking and just a line of cars going around the track with almost identical lap times but no overtaking. human error makes things entertaining.