The world’s first driverless, electric racing competition, is set to take pride of place in January.
What? No driver? Who do we cheer? Sounds about as exciting as watching the grass grow from where I’m sitting.
Dubbed Roborace, the event will be held in conjunction with Autosport International 2018, from January 11 to 14 in the UK.
Designed by the same bloke who designed the vehicles for Hollywood movies such as Tron, Roborace’s autonomous Robocar is designed to show clearly that there is no human driver in the vehicle.
Weighing just over 1000kg, it boasts four 300kW motors – one at each wheel to allow torque vectoring – making the car capable of speeds over 320km/h.
Roborace will complement existing racing that uses human drivers – such as FIA Formula E.
It will provide an environment to develop A.I. technology for road vehicles at a faster rate than they can be developed on regular roads.
Roborace gives organisations developing driverless technologies an extreme yet safe environment to test their software and hardware pushing them to the limits of their capabilities.
Robocar’s Nvida Drive PX2 GPU “brain” is capable of up to 24 trillion A.I. operations per second.
“It’s a pleasure to bring Robocar to the Autosport Stage,” Roborace CEO, Lucas Di Grassi, said.
“Roborace is the first and only competition series in the world for autonomous driver technologies and is therefore an important part of the motorsport world.
“Autosport International gives us the opportunity to meet visitors and introduce them to the incredible possibilities of autonomous technology and the very real application it will have to their own road cars in the coming years.”