Updated: With Goodwood Festival of Speed now concluded, we can witness the amazing hillclimb run of DevBot 2.0, reaching the top at 66.96 seconds and achieving a top speed of 101 mph. The car was completely autonomous, using sensors and LIDAR signals to see the course and intelligently operate the steering and power.
Roborace made a debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last year, in 2018. Their first AI-driven prototype, Robocar, shocked everybody as it rolled onto the famous Hillclimb course with no human driver behind the wheel.
There wasn’t even a cockpit, to begin with – just 500 horsepower worth of electric motors, wrapped in a futuristic carbon fiber shell with sensors and computers making all the decisions.
Twelve months later, Roborace is back at Goodwood and they’ve brought their DevBot 2.0 race car. The new model looks more believable with the proportions of an LMP1 race car. Underneath the carbon fiber chassis is the same electric powertrain as in the original Robocar, but it’s rear-wheel-drive only.
Most importantly, there is a cockpit now, allowing drivers to take control of the vehicle. Roborace is using professional race drivers to help develop the AI software and literally teach the car to drive itself.
So far, the progress is amazing. In fact, the AI will drive around the track faster than most people can. It’s still slower than real-life racing drivers, but it will get there soon.
Roborace has already started Season Alpha – the first season of a new racing format where teams will be racing the same car around the track, the difference being, each will have to develop their own software and AI-driver to operate the vehicle.
You can watch Episode 01 below.
So far, three teams have joined – the University of Pisa, Technical University of Munich and Arrival – a company developing autonomous transportation for real-world application. Roborace and Arrival are also working together with a Dutch startup to develop the first long-range solar-powered car – Lightyear One.
Creating an AI-driven race car is so much harder than you might think. Autonomous vehicle leaders like Tesla and Waymo have been developing such technology for a decade now and they are far from done.
Racing uses the same decision-making processes as driving on the public road – brake before the turn, accelerate, overtake.
However, at the track where cars are moving at triple digits, you have milliseconds to evaluate your situation and act before you fly into a wall. Developing software that can keep up with this tempo will advance autonomous driving technology for the cars of tomorrow.
Proving grounds like the Goodwood Festival of Speed serve to benchmark the progress. We’re still waiting for footage of the official run. Goodwood has a couple more days, so check back soon for our updates.
For now, you can enjoy last year’s phenomenal run with the Robocar prototype.