Self-driving race cars zip into history
A RACECAR WITH NObody at the wheel snaked around another to snatch the lead on an oval track at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last Friday (Jan 7) in an unprecedented high-speed match between self-driving vehicles.
Members of Italian-American team PoliMOVE cheered as their racecar, nicknamed “Minerva”, passed a rival from South Korean team Kaist doing nearly 115km/h.
However, organisers said the real victory was the fact that self-driving algorithms could handle the high-speed competition.
The race pitted teams of students from around the world against one another to rev up the capabilities of self-driving cars, improving the technology for use anywhere.
The single seat usually reserved for a driver was during this race instead packed with electronics. The students program the software that pilots the car by quickly analysing data from sophisticated sensors.
The software piloting the cars has to anticipate how other vehicles on the course will behave, then maneuver accordingly.
“It plays out in milliseconds,” co-organiser Paul Mitchell said. “The computer has to make the same decisions as a human driver, despite the speed.”
In October, the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) put the brakes on self-driving cars racing together to allow more time to ready technology for the challenge, opting instead to let them do laps individually to see which had the best time.
Now the IAC plans to organise other races pitting two cars against each other, with the hope of reaching a level sufficient to one day launch all the vehicles together.