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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: 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