You certainly remember Motobot, the electronic clone of Valentino Rossi that we presented to you last May. Science fiction? Not that much…
Indeed, if due to the complexity of the motorcycle field, Motobots is still very far from matching its human model, it is not the same in automobiles and we are already preparing to organize a championship of competition cars without a driver.
This one, called roborace, would take place on the same urban circuits as Formula E which is growing more and more every day. The first demonstration was scheduled in Hong Kong last October and, in fact, we will have to wait a little longer to witness a real race of these cars equipped, to replace humans, with Drive PX2 supercomputers from Nvidia, which uses 12 cores of 24 teraflops, as well as five LIDAR detection systems, two proximity radars and also two navigation systems, GPS and GLONASS (a satellite positioning system of Russian origin). Or a digital brain that can perform 24 trillion operations per second.
However, if the rolling laboratory Devbot is relatively advanced (see the video), the final model (see 3D rendering below) and the championship project still really seem to us to be at a more than embryonic stage...
However, things are progressing so quickly in this area that we could see some demonstrations as early as 2017, following the schedule provided by the British manufacturer.
And, undoubtedly far from being trivial, Michelin
just got involved in this future championship!
So let's have no doubt that this will happen one day, and probably sooner than we think.
But after the technological prowess will then arise the eternal question of the choice between sport and spectacle...
Site of RobotRace
