On the occasion of the Rome Formula E Grand Prix, Roborace confronted his autonomous racing car with a professional driver. Who wins ?
Like artificial intelligences that are measured against the best players of Go or Starcraft, for an autonomous race car, the point of reference is a car driver. Roborace has therefore taken an additional step in his project by confronting his DevBot with a professional pilot.
On the occasion of the Rome Formula E Grand Prix, the youngster measured his autonomous electric race car to Ryan Tuerck. This Formula Drift pilot (skids in controlled skidding) took the wheel of the DevBot and, after a few turns of heating, established a reference time of 1 min 51 s.
DEVBOT HAS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Has the autonomous racing car done better? Not really. Led by its sensors and artificial intelligence, the DevBot was slower by 26 seconds with a lap in 2 minutes and 18 seconds. A veritable chasm in terms of competitions between human pilots who compete at tenths of a second.
Despite everything, the performance of the DevBot is impressive and shows the progress made since the first few laps. Remember that the ultimate goal is to create a championship in which will compete autonomous race cars. It remains to be seen whether the spectators will be passionate about an event without drivers in which to place their hopes of victory ...