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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: 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