How Roborace plans to improve autonomous cars through racing
1How Roborace plans to improve autonomous cars through racing.
When I showed up at the Nvidia booth at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there wasn’t much to see. There was a green race car in the middle and a bunch of people standing around it. I took pictures of the car and was about to move on, but then, I noticed there was no cockpit on the car. I was looking at a Roborace vehicle.
Daniel Simon, the creator of sci-fi cars in Tron: Legacy, designed the green vehicle as the first driverless electric racing car. It weighs 2,204 pounds and is about 15.7 feet long. It has four motors and one big battery, and it can go more than 200 miles per hour. It also has an Nvidia Drive PX2 brain, capable of up to 24 trillion AI operations per second. Soon, it will be upgraded to Xavier, Nvidia’s new AI chip with 9 billion transistors.
Roborace’s creators hope the car could be the foundation of a racing competition among the creators of autonomous car software. In this case, it isn’t always the fastest car that is the best. It’s the one that can avoid pedestrians and other obstacles on a course that isn’t a simple oval, said Rod Chong, chief creative officer, in an interview at CES.
The hardware — the actual car — for the different teams will be the same, and the competition will take place in software. It could lead to better AI, much like early race cars led to the creation of disc brakes, Chong said. Chong, who previously worked on the Project Cars games, said Roborace will also have a gaming angle to it. I also spoke with Bryn Balcombe, chief technology officer at Roborace.