Category Autonomous car Drivers 0 | Country International Teams 10 Official website roborace.com | |
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Roborace first look mwc 2017
Roborace will be a motorsport championship with autonomously driving, electrically powered vehicles. The series will be held on the same tracks the FIA Formula E Championship uses. It will be the first global championship for driverless cars.
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The first race is intended to take place during the 2016–17 Formula E season. Ten teams, each with two driverless cars, will compete in one-hour races over the full season. All teams will have equal cars, but will have to develop their own real-time computing algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies.
Inside roborace episode 6
Robocar
For the first season, all teams will be supplied with an electric racing car built by Kinetik, called the "Robocar". The chassis was designed by Daniel Simon, who previously worked on vehicles for movies such as Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, along with painting the 2011 HRT Formula One Car. Michelin will be the official tyre supplier, with the internal computing units being provided by Nvidia.
The chassis itself is shaped similar to a teardrop, improving aerodynamic efficiency. During the first Roborace season torque vectoring will be allowed. A small rear wing at the rear end of a the car indicates one or more powerful electric motors. Kinetik expects the cars to be capable of reaching top speeds of more than 300 km/h (190 mph).
DevBot
Development of the Robocar started in early 2016, with a first outing of a test vehicle, the so-called "DevBot", following in the summer of the same year. The test car consisted of the same internal units (battery, motor, electronics) used in the Robocar, but were placed in the chassis of a LMP3 Ginetta without an engine cover in order to provide better cooling.
DevBot saw its first public outing at the Formula E pre-season tests in Donington Park in August 2016. After battery issues in Hong Kong caused the development team to abandon their demonstration run, the DevBot successfully drove twelve laps around the Moulay El Hassan Formula E circuit in Marrakesh.
During testing ahead of the 2017 Buenos Aires ePrix, two Devbot cars raced against each other. One successfully avoided a dog that ran onto the course. The other car crashed on a corner.
Other test tracks included Michelin's testing ground in Ladoux and the Silverstone Stowe Circuit. Further test runs are planned for the following Formula E events.
Teams
Ten teams will feature two cars each on the 20-car grid in the inaugural season of Roborace. At the moment, it is not known which teams will join the series. At least one of the ten squads, however, is set to be a "Crowd Sourced Community" team, backed by private investors and open for AI developers from around the globe.