Try Not To Get Creeped Out By This Roborace Development Car's Autonomous Lap
Over 18 months on from the initial announcement about the series, we’re still not sure how to feel when it comes to Roborace. The idea of a driverless racing series is arguably besides the entire point of motorsport, but then again, we can’t help but be curious about how the proposed Formula E support series will shape up.
This week, we’ve been given a little taster, thanks to this footage depicting a moderately unsettling autonomous lap of the Berlin E-Prix track undertaken by ‘DevBot’. It’s a development car for the series, and if you’re wondering why it has a steering wheel, that’s because it’s a long way from the finished article.
Devbot has same basic guts that’ll be used for the futuristic-looking Roborace cars, all stuffed inside a bastardised Ginetta LMP3 car. It’s designed so it can be driven by humans, “allowing teams to fully understand how the car thinks and feels on a racetrack alongside the comprehensive real-time data,” Roborace organisers said last year.
In Berlin, DevBot managed to get within eight per cent of the time managed with a human driving. So, the squishy bit behind the wheel isn’t irrelevant just yet, then…
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
if this is where motorsport goes, then I think the correct term for petrolheads is:”Doomed”, I’m more than sure none of the people who worked on this car can be even remotely called petrolheads.
Why does this site always make such a big deal about it ? This i’ve never understood ? As if in the future humans won’t drive cars anymore; or motorsport is forcibly going to be rid of this earth ? Has the fact that now they have robot football championships hopelessly condemned human football ? No ? What a surprise. I personnally value the huge scientific effort put into that sort of development.
i was sceptical at first too but when you think about the amount of races you had with ai’s on all sorts of racing games it’s not that bad of an idea. those aren’t real drivers too and i’ve had some reaal close racing wih ai on raceroom. a good idea could be to put a real driver in one car and see how he does against an army of driverless cars. or just imagine what would happen if someone hacked into their programm and made them run on a burnout game ai. not that i’d pay money for.
Theyre bigger car people than you’ll ever be. Their job is to literally tinker with an LMP3 chassis.
Can we expect a Nurburgring record for autonomous cars now?
If we continue like this we will have a lap record for an autonomous red with blue rims car
Its not the end of motorsport as we know it. Its just another category. We just get to watch more thats it !
And Autonomous cars are much faster (in the future) and have a much higher chance for crashing. And we all know, more crashes =more fun
Can someone take that Dodge Charger commercial with George Washington charging the British, but replace the British soldiers with autonomous cars. Would be nice. :)
It did it better than me
Paul Walker’s spirit lives on????
wut
It seems nobody is taking control of their cars I guess, right?
Sounds like hundred evil creepy laughing clowns.
If this is where racing goes (in fully confident it won’t because people that actually like cars will t watch it) then it is just going to be a train of cars, no overtakes
You mean like F1 but faster then?
How big are this robot’s balls?