It’s robot vs robot in new race series
TODAY’S top racing drivers are often accused of being PR robots, with personalities muted by their respective teams. Show up, shut up and race. Give the corporate line to media. Don’t express emotion. Just drive, and make sponsors happy.
But now a new race series will soon take the one organic element out of ‘man and machine’, and introduce a new formula comprising a grid of seriously hi-tech, completely driverless cars.
The new series, called Roborace, has been in gestation for some time but now for the first time we have an idea of what the all-electric autonomous racecar will look like … and it looks awesome.
Conceived by Daniel Simon (the man behind the wild, neon-lit vehicles in the sci-fi movie Tron), the Robocar seems to have teleported from a circuit of the future, with an impossibly sexy stance, exaggerated wing-like fenders and zero provision for a cockpit.
The cars will be built by Kinetik (a Russian company which has also worked on a range of electric trucks and buses) and are reported to be capable of speeds over 300km/h thanks to four electric motors, each with 300kW outputs. A computerised ‘brain’ will calculate 24 trillion AI (artificial intelligence) operations per second, and is fed by data from a two optical speed sensors, two radars, five lidars, 18 ultrasonic sensors, six cameras and a satellite navigation system.
Roborace has said little about how the actual race formats will work, but we presume strategies will be based on suspension setups coupled with battery power management and algorithm-controlled levels of ‘driver’ aggressiveness.
Organisers also won’t pin down an introduction date (they already missed last year’s deadline), but have committed to a partnership with the existing Formula E Championship, and could get the go ahead before the end of the year.
The initial plan is for a grid of ten teams with two cars each, to contest a series of one-hour races to be run in conjunction with Formula E calendar dates.
At a recent promo event, two prototype ‘Devbot’ cars which were built on regular race car chassis but featured much of the autonomous processing equipment, set off without drivers around the Buenos Aires ePrix circuit for the first public demonstration of what’s to come.
The cars cornered at a rather gingerly pace, but reached speeds of around 180km/h on the straights. The demo run, as impressive as it was, ended with one of the cars self-driving into a wall.