Hold on to your stomach because this is going to feel a bit strange. Roborace, the upcoming race series that will see driverless vehicles duking it out (and in all likelihood crashing it up, at first) on the track, has put together the second of a series of behind-the-scenes looks at Roborace’s early days. In Episode 2 (above), we’re given a look at DevBot testing — including a hands-free drive with the AI system making the decisions.
It’s a bit of a day-in-the-life of Roborace’s DevBot, which starts (in this case) early in the morning at Silverstone with two DevBot vehicles. DevBot is the name of the test beds being used to build a self-driving race car, for those that missed the memo.
There’s a lot of work that goes into taking these hopefully-autonomous cars around the track, including a few laps with a human driver at the controls. But it’s in the later stages of the day, at around the 3:45 mark in the video above, that things start to get hairy. That’s when the driver lifts his hands from the wheel and the AI takes over at high speed.
The over-the-shoulder view is about as close as we’re getting, for now, to the sensation of being in a robot-controlled vehicle and even just watching it is a touch terrifying. How the driver manages to keep his hands away from the wheel is beyond us. Still, one day this will be the norm, rather than the exception.We’d better get used to it. Just… not at racetrack speeds.
Source: Roborace (YouTube)