Davide Nativo
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This year, Goodwood Festival of Speed weekend (12-15 July) will surely be remembered for something unique: the debut of Robocar and the first ever attempt of a self-driving vehicle at the classic hillclimb.
The car is equipped with four electric motors, each producing 135 kW. Weight comes in at about 1.350 kg (2.976 pounds), with the prototype capable of hitting 320 km/h (198 mph) thanks to its total power output of around 500 hp. The “driver” is an NVidia Drive PX 2 platform, which uses two Parker processors units consisting each of a 256 core Pascal GPU. The company claims that the board can run up to 24 trillion deep learning operations per second. The “eyes” are 5 LIDAR units, 18 ultrasonic sensors, 2 radar units, 2 optical speed sensors, 6 cameras, and a GPS navigation device.
The car features a sleek aerodynamic, futuristic, look, designed by Daniel Simon, German artist and former Volkswagen and Bugatti designer, who sketched the visionary vehicles seen in movies such as 'Tron: Legacy' and 'Oblivion'.
"I can't think of a more exciting way to celebrate our Silver Jubilee than to have Roborace attempt the first autonomous race car run up the hill - said the Duke of Richmond and founder of the Festival of Speed, Charles Gordon-Lennox - Roborace plays an important role in the future of mobility, challenging public perceptions and providing a platform to advance new technologies. This makes them the perfect partner to undertake this significant feat."
Lucas di Grassi, former F1, WEC driver and Formula E champion, CEO of Roborace, added: “We are excited that the Duke of Richmond has invited us to make history at Goodwood as we attempt the first ever fully – and truly – autonomous uphill climb using only artificial intelligence.”
It won’t be an easy task for the futuristic concept car, to tackle the 1.16 miles (1.9 km) hillclimb venue. Sergey Malygin, head of the development team at ARRIVAL, the automotive technology company behind Robocar’s self-drive algorithm, explains why:
“The Goodwood hill climb presents a real challenge for level 4/level 5 autonomous driving systems. It is a narrow track with complex geometry. Turns and hills with a great deal of tree coverage mean you can’t rely on GPS/RTK signal for localisation. Use of all advanced sensors, including LIDARs and cameras with deep learning based computer vision methods are needed to perform well at this course.”
Here at RaceDepartment we wish Robocar the best of luck!
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Are you looking forward to Robocar appearance at Goodwood FoS? What do you think of self-driving race cars? Let us know in the comments below!
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