Roborace – a new driverless electric car series (from Formula E and Kinetik) is gaining shape with the first images of racing vehicles revealed. A new kind of vehicle was designed by the Daniel Simon.
The cars has 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.
Nvidia said that it will put its Drive PX 2 AI - the world’s most powerful engines for in-vehicle artificial intelligence into the driverless cars that will compete in the upcoming Roborace Championship series.
DRIVE PX2 uses 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.
“Since the cars don’t need human drivers, these racecars are incredibly compact, and the designs — conceived by auto designer Daniel Simon, the man behind Tron: Legacy’s light cycles — are like nothing that’s been seen on a road, or a racetrack, before,” Nvidia’s Danny Shapiro said in a blog. “There’s no room in these racers for the trunk full of PCs that powered earlier generations of autonomous vehicles.”
