ROBORace

[SR71]

Daniel Simon's involved. Sounds interesting.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/30/11325 ... ustom-cars

[FW17]

[Andres125sx]

[RicME85]

The new Roborace series – the first ever for autonomous racing cars – has revealed the dimensions and motor supplier of its machinery.

The cars will be 4.8-metres long, and 2-metres wide, with a wheelbase of 2.8 metres and weighing in at 1000kg.

To put that in context, the car will be 200mm shorter than a Formula E single-seater but 200mm wider. It weighs 112kg more than a FE machine, despite that car's all-up figure including the driver’s weight.

Roborace has partnered with NVIDIA to supply its DRIVE PX2 motors – the world’s most powerful engines for in-vehicle artificial intelligence.

The announcement was made by Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, and Denis Sverdlov, CEO of Roborace, during a keynote session at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday.

DRIVE PX2 can fuse data from 12 cameras, as well as radar, lidar (laser-light radar) and ultrasonic sensors. This allows algorithms to accurately understand the full 360-degree environment around the car to produce a robust representation, including static and moving objects.

Its two next-generation Tegra® processors plus two next-generation discrete GPUs, based on the Pascal™ architecture, deliver up to 24 trillion operations per second, which are specialized instructions that accelerate the maths used in deep learning network inference.

[machin]

Is it just me or the does the idea of those "Roborace" cars above fail to provide much excitement?

On the other hand.... a race between the robots Asimo, C3P0, the T1000 (amongst others) in current F1 cars sounds really rather appealing!!!!

[RicME85]

It's odd.
The cars are as large if not bigger than the FE cars yet the 'brain' of the car is apparently the size of a lunch box. If that is the case, why is the car so big?
There isnt enough difference between the cars what with them being spec cars and spec electronics (this includes the various sensors), if there were different cars or different electronics then there could be more variations, as it stands its down to who comes up with the best algorithm.

[FW17]

Will these cars be ready by September 2016?

I hope someone other than Dallara are chosen for chassis and they employ a nose mounted cooling inlet

[Tim.Wright]

The cars are as large if not bigger than the FE cars yet the 'brain' of the car is apparently the size of a lunch box. If that is the case, why is the car so big?

Like everything these days, it was styled rather than engineered.

[Andres125sx]

Size provide realism. Small cars can be way too fast to be confortable to watch.

I learnt that after more than 20 years using all sort of rc vehicles, cars, planes, helicopters..... The small ones are very convenient to transport etc, but so agile and nervous realism is drastically reduced. Not sure how do you say it in english, but if the term exist, the scale speed increase too much with small vehicles

The bigger ones are very similar to the 1:1 scale vehicles tough, as inertia is similar and so are the movements, while the small ones have so little inertia direction changes can be extremely fast in any direction.

Compare these two videos, first 1:10 scale, movements are too fast (IMO)


While this 1:5 race movements, or scale speed, is a lot more realistic.


Keep in mind this are RC cars wich are toys and driven by humans remotedly (lines are far from optimal), Roborace cars should be way way faster for same size, so if they´d have gone for smaller cars, they could be too fast

[RicME85]

Well I didnt expect them to be RC toy car size, just not bigger than the FE cars.
These cars are supposed to do over 180mph and are bigger and heavier could be a worry for spectator safety.
A good piece on RoboRace: http://www.racecar-engineering.com/blog ... -roborace/

[FW17]

Well I didnt expect them to be RC toy car size, just not bigger than the FE cars.
These cars are supposed to do over 180mph and are bigger and heavier could be a worry for spectator safety.
A good piece on RoboRace: http://www.racecar-engineering.com/blog ... -roborace/

They will look quiet small on track as the entire car is just as tall as the tyres without the center roll bar and in take structures.

[SR71]

It's odd.
The cars are as large if not bigger than the FE cars yet the 'brain' of the car is apparently the size of a lunch box. If that is the case, why is the car so big?
There isnt enough difference between the cars what with them being spec cars and spec electronics (this includes the various sensors), if there were different cars or different electronics then there could be more variations, as it stands its down to who comes up with the best algorithm.

Yes, that's exactly the point. The algorithm is the real technology here and that's what they want to show off. It's exactly the same as a spec series highlighting the difference between drivers.

We all know they could build different cars that's not impressive.

[FW17]

What are the possibilities of seeing pack racing on a road course?

[RicME85]

It's odd.
The cars are as large if not bigger than the FE cars yet the 'brain' of the car is apparently the size of a lunch box. If that is the case, why is the car so big?
There isnt enough difference between the cars what with them being spec cars and spec electronics (this includes the various sensors), if there were different cars or different electronics then there could be more variations, as it stands its down to who comes up with the best algorithm.

Yes, that's exactly the point. The algorithm is the real technology here and that's what they want to show off. It's exactly the same as a spec series highlighting the difference between drivers.

We all know they could build different cars that's not impressive.

Yes but they have neutered it by having spec CPU/GPU and spec sensors.
I dont believe there will be enough variation in the algorithms to produce anything approaching a decent race.

[SR71]

It's odd.
The cars are as large if not bigger than the FE cars yet the 'brain' of the car is apparently the size of a lunch box. If that is the case, why is the car so big?
There isnt enough difference between the cars what with them being spec cars and spec electronics (this includes the various sensors), if there were different cars or different electronics then there could be more variations, as it stands its down to who comes up with the best algorithm.

Yes, that's exactly the point. The algorithm is the real technology here and that's what they want to show off. It's exactly the same as a spec series highlighting the difference between drivers.

We all know they could build different cars that's not impressive.

Yes but they have neutered it by having spec CPU/GPU and spec sensors.
I dont believe there will be enough variation in the algorithms to produce anything approaching a decent race.

.

Really that's interesting. What's your background in algorithm development that leads you to believe this?