The technology to enable self-driving vehicles is maturing faster and faster these days. Google, Delphi, and others are testing their autonomous cars on the streets of California and elsewhere, taking journalists for rides and even getting into the occasional fender-bender. Audi is one of the car makers leading the charge for autonomous vehicles, and it's been demoing its technology on the racetrack. Last year the company showed off a self-driving RS7 called "Bobby" at the season finale of the German equivalent of NASCAR. Today, the company announced that Bobby's smarter, lighter sibling "Robby" has been taking to the track here in the US, and he's faster than ever.
Robby has been putting Audi's autonomous driving tech to the test at Sonoma Raceway in California, 90 minutes north of Silicon Valley. The new car is 882lbs (400kg) lighter than its predecessor, and even with the sensors and processors it's only now approaching the weight of the production RS7. Audi says it isn't just teaching the car to lap for publicity though, the point is to make sure that a self-driving car is capable of exploiting the entire performance envelope of the vehicle.
I've been told by racing fans that it is the possibility of catastrophic human error that keeps them glued to their seats. Would robotic racing take the fun out of it?
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:57PM
I saw this article the other day on ars. I wonder if a computer can ever be faster than a human driver. Maybe for things like Nascar or Formula 1 where the track can be well known before hand, but what about rally? Rally racing has constantly changing road surfaces, and I just don't know if a computer would be able to compensate at the last moment for an icy patch or large rock that needs to be avoided.
I'd love to see a computer try though!
(Score: 4, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:19PM
I wonder if a computer can ever be faster than a human...
Whatever word comes next, the answer is yes. Eventually.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:33PM
-- I wonder if a computer can ever be faster than a human...
Whatever word comes next, the answer is yes. Eventually.
...faster than a human at picking up a girl/guy in a bar?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:43PM
...faster than a human at picking up a girl/guy in a bar?
Let's not pick on Snow, now.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:52PM
If it's a champagne spraying sex robot, yes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:57AM
... at getting drunk?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:59PM
My guess is yes. Would someone buy a racing game just to watch a bunch of NPC's race around? I can certainly see it developing a niche though.
I'm not a fan of motorsports but I have a friend who loves F1 and some rally stuff which I have watched. The real interesting video (for F1) is the 3rd person outside view looking over the driver's shoulder. It really gives you a feel of the speed and it is really interesting watching how the driver quickly reacts to the track. That is pretty amazing to watch. A computer doing the same isn't as impressive. Plus, who shakes and sprays the champagne when the car wins?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:04PM
sex bots
(Score: 1) by kanweg on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:05PM
camel races are performed with robots as jockeys
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/15/sport/camel-racing-dubai/ [cnn.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_racing [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0aEtNH1NyY [youtube.com]
Bert
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:15PM
Perhaps they can put people standing along side the road to be killed horribly when the cars crash. That should put the excitement into robotic racing.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by tynin on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:54PM
Assuming that the computers are flawless drivers, I imagine adding topless women on skates rolling the track, and watching the cars have to make course corrections to keep the lead and avoid disaster, might just be pretty awesome.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:39PM
Well, they can add an extra part to the competition: Allowing the opponent team to try to hack the cars during the race. This would give a twofold advantage: It allows for spectacular failures, and it gives the car companies a good incentive to care about the security of their cars (where hopefully some of that experience would also be used on standard consumer cars).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @09:47AM
It would also widen the audience: While the usual audience enjoys the cars going round and sometimes crash, the nerd audience enjoys a separate stream reporting about the hacking efforts.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 15 2015, @07:59PM
That reminded me of an idea I had for Robocode [sourceforge.net]. Find the thread your opponent is running in and call Thread.stop() on it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:16AM
It depends. A lot of the performance difference in F1 already comes from different engines, aerodynamic characteristics and so on. The rules are fairly constraining in terms of what is allowed, and a lot of this is for safety reasons. F1 where there's no possibility of a human dying as a result of a crash would make it possible for the teams to push their cars a lot closer to the envelope, have lower weight, and so on.
Watching a racing simulator with completely realistic physics might also be entertaining if multiple teams competed to design the best vehicle (obeying the rules of the simulation) and AI to drive it, but doing it on a real track makes it a lot easier to guarantee no cheating - if you can exploit bugs in the physics engine of the real world then you probably deserve to win.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:37PM
I wonder how they happened to choose Sonoma? One guess, it has pretty good sight lines everywhere.
When an automated Audi can lap Laguna Seca (Monterey, CA) with the blind descent into "the corkscrew", then they will really have something.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:41PM
I'm pretty sure that virtual cars have been racing most real tracks for enough years. It's not that hard to translate that part to a real car.
(Score: 2) by quadrox on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:38AM
In racing games the AI cars will know the track without any sensor information - it's basically programmed in. They don't rely on sensor/camera information to drive, which is what a real card would have to do even with access to GPS and a map of the track.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @09:51AM
Of course in human-driven car racings, typically the humans also have learned the track before the race. Maybe not to the detail the AI would store it, but certainly enough that they would not be surprised by any obstacle they encounter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @11:40PM
> "I've been told by racing fans that it is the possibility of catastrophic human error that keeps them glued to their seats..."
Which probably explains how they don't fall asleep at Indianapolis. Other people value different aspects, like the way pilots and race cars interpret a circuit. A race held at the local Motor Show here won't have cars reaching 80mph, yet there is plenty to enjoy. Unfortunately F1 is mostly boring too, so they need unrelated things like pit stops.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday July 15 2015, @12:14AM
I've been told by racing fans that it is the possibility of catastrophic human error that keeps them glued to their seats. Would robotic racing take the fun out of it?
the concern for human life is what has held back the sport. if the car isn't 100% stable, someone could die and that's what's preventing people from having more aggressive races. i think there would far more aggressive competition if there were no worries about people getting hurt. however, if they are going to be risking exploding their cars often, they will need to build them much cheaper too. entertainment is a balancing act, so i think 500 laps in an oval will go out the door and move to something more interesting an challenging like off-road rally racing.
(Score: 1) by black6host on Wednesday July 15 2015, @12:32AM
Nobody seems to have mentioned NASCAR racing. It's not something that I'm partial to but a lot of people I know are quite fond of it. Two things make them scream and yell with glee: 1) cars crashing into each other for revenge and 2) the fights after the race.
Remember, NASCAR arose from the vehicles that were souped up to run moonshine. Redneck city, all the way :)
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday July 15 2015, @01:53AM
(Score: 1) by Kawumpa on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:40AM
It's an insult.
(Score: 1) by Kharnynb on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:38AM
Will it also be hanging on your rear bumper and flashing it's lights, to emulate the real audi experience?
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.