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
They could have used the B-Spec mode of GranTurismo 5…
First it destroys our lap times…then us
KILL THAT WITH FIRE!!
Well…. jk Lol
But what’s the point of this? The real fun of any skill (especially driving), is seeing how good you can get. Once you completely remove the human element, what’s there to strive for?
Same as before… faster lap times.
The undeniable fact is that there is great skill involved with creating something like this and whether you develop a machine like this with a fixed algorithm based on your interpretation of the fastest way round the track or with a self-learning program where it teaches itself the fastest way around as it completes laps there will always be, among the competitive set, another goal to push for.
Well this is the future of Nascar. Less crashes and more people at their computer trying to win.. Can’t wait until someone hacks one of the cars and the car goes and crashes. Be so much fun..
Seems like people hating really don’t even have that good of an understanding of computers, Ai, and the actual planned intent of the racing series to begin with.