A newly designed driverless car called Roborace will make a new spin on wheels, and it isn't something ordinary, either because the vehicle isn't operated with a human driver behind the wheels. It's completely AI-controlled. The leaders behind Roborace hired Daniel Simon to do some navigating in designing the car. Simon is also responsible for designing the vehicles in Tron: Legacy, Oblivion's drones and spaceships and Captain America's hydra vehicles.
Since Roborace is influenced and geared more toward competition and entertainment, it's only fitting that the AI vehicle has a stellar appearance and is high on the beauty scale. Daniel Simon had been working with engineers and aerodynamicists to come up with something more that has the attractive level on a visual stand-point and is more than just movie idea. It can reach speeds of up to 186mph. That's even faster than Audi's self-driving RS 7 race car which has speeds that reach up to 149mph.
RoboRace vehicle (Image via RoboRace)
Formula E teamed up with a company that specializes in this type of technology, called Kinetik- which is to help design and write smarter algorithms to help drive the Roborace vehicle. The goal of this is to see which team will have the ability to design the best car - not in visual representation, but in genuine "smartness" to drive the car. The goal is to see who can best train these vehicles to drive like professionally trained humans. The challenge is exciting and may pose many advancements in technology down the road.
Nowadays, everyone's wondering if the Roborace can outrace a human. So far, the answer to this questions is a straight-forward and to the point "no." It was proven in a race with a professional drifter, Ryan Tuerck and he was the clear winner. He had claimed a 26-second lead on the Roborace. As shown in the video found here, you can see him celebrating his victory:
It's pretty standard to expect a human to perform that well, too.
RoboRace seems to be uplifting their competition level by claiming its technology that involves the use of both computer vision and LiDAR could potentially beat out a human in a race by the end of 2018. The company aims to improve autonomous driving on the road via the use of motorsports and any task completed successfully on the road would translate well to improvements.
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