Self-Driving Car Speed Race Ends With A Crash (electrek.co) 87
An anonymous reader writes:On a professional track in Buenos Aires, fans watched the first Formula E auto race with self-driving electric cars. "Roborace's two test vehicles battled it out on the circuit at a reasonably quick 115MPH," reports Engadget, "but one of the cars crashed after it took a turn too aggressively. The racing league was quick to tout the safety advantages of crashing autonomous cars ('no drivers were harmed'), but it's clear that the tech is still rough around the edges." Electrek is reporting that the cars "still have a cabin for a driver but neither car's cabin was occupied during the event." The ultimate goal is to have several teams racing the exact same self-driving car, while letting each team customize its car's driving software.
An Argentinian journalist shared footage of the race cars on Twitter, and apparently at one point a dog wandered out in front of an oncoming race car. But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
An Argentinian journalist shared footage of the race cars on Twitter, and apparently at one point a dog wandered out in front of an oncoming race car. But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
Boring (Score:1)
Nobody gives a fuck about Formula E.
or Driverless racing (Score:4, Insightful)
People watch racing because there is risk of a crash with humans in the cockpit. People drive in professional racing because there is a risk to themselves. Those things translate into money, jobs, technological advancements in vehicles (performance and safety). Take away the human element and it's like sitting and watching airplanes fly. Interesting for a few visits, but no sustainable market and not really entertaining. Put up a bar and bleacher stand, and it would be mostly empty.
Hell, look at the robot warrior events, which are cool but don't make money for any duration of time.
If they are doing this to build safety, no spectators needed. IMHO, bit whoop. Sarcastiball anyone?
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely correct. It wa
Re: (Score:3)
People watch racing because there is risk of a crash with humans in the cockpit
I watch racing, but a crash is the last thing I want to see.
Re: (Score:2)
And I agree, but it is the risk that makes it interesting, the human element.
It's an interesting technology that can only add to the abilities of self driving considering how much a track with minutely known characteristics can change over the course of a race, And then there are the 'marbles' of rubber on the outsides of the curves. Nothing quite as exciting as getting into the marbles at a hundred MPH in turn four and glancing off the g
Re: (Score:1)
I for one watch for the car wrecks not the people wracks.
Totally disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
People watch racing because there is risk of a crash with humans in the cockpit.
That is totally absurd. People love watching destruction, yes, but humans do not have to be involved for enjoyment - witness the great ratings shows like Robot Wars got, and those were glorified remote control cars. People just liked watching them violently disassemble each other...
The same will be true of e-racing. Fans will still thrill to a crash, because it will still show basically the same thing - a super expensive car disintegrating into scrap. In fact though it could be even more fun than human races since the rules could be altered such that AI cars had to drive through any wreckage present, no cleanup during the race. That would be awesome to see as AI did high speed moves to avoid scrap...
Re: (Score:2)
Robot wars used differing hardware. The fun was in that, not so much the bot AI.
This will be interesting until the meta-game is solved. Once everyone is using the same optimizations, it's over. I guess that's fine for showcasing advancements in self-driving cars.
Hmm, OK, I can see this being a longer term thing if used for rally instead of boring circuit races. Having the bots race through mud and ice and so on would be much more interesting, both to watch and in the tech.
OTOH, once the AI gets good, a
Re:Totally disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
You know, that would be epic. "Battlebots : Live fire edition. Sponsored by the U.S. Army". It would have to be done on a special range and all the technicians would retreat to a bunker and then through hard wires, arm the power and weapon systems of the dueling robots. It would be an unrestricted class, with the exception that every weapon has to have a safety system that is supplied by the military, and the weapons themselves would be restricted to commonly available military ordnance.
To make it more
Re: (Score:2)
Skynet is just lying in wait, patiently guiding the development.....
"Differing Hardware" (Score:2)
Robot wars used differing hardware.
Pretty much it was the same few designs. So all of the fun was watching to see which approach ended up working.
The same is true of racing AI, especially to see different approaches in passing or speed management will be interesting. The thing that would kill it is if the AI's are not aggressive enough to be interesting.
Facts don't agree with you (Score:3)
If you had bothered to read my whole post you would have seen I mentioned specifically Robot wars. Ratings were mediocre at best on a mediocre market channel. Racing has a massive fan base, sell out crowds across the globe, massive amounts of funding for product spokespersons, massive sponsor contracts and awards.
If human risk was not an issue in drawing and maintaining crowds then you need to explain a continued success of boxing, UFC, Xtreme Games, The Blue Angels and Redbull extreme flying events, vari
Re: (Score:2)
If you had bothered to read my whole post you would have seen I mentioned specifically Robot wars.
And you are not hearing what *I* was saying, which is that Robot Wars got decent (I'll admit they were not great) rating EVEN ThOUGH IT WAS BASICALLY JUST RC CARS.
That's inherently more boring than having real AI compete against each other, at much higher speeds and with the dramatically more interesting destruction that comes as a result of speed...
Besides, it's not like spectators cannot be killed!
Re: (Score:2)
I heard you fine and gave you facts to back my claim, which in turn discounts yours. You even admit that evidence shows that you are empirically wrong, yet still attempt to claim that AI will make a difference. No, it won't. Just like Robot Wars, AI Racing will have a tiny number of people watching, and most of those will be gone as soon as the novelty wears off. There are facts to back my claim, and those facts run counter to yours. Why not look at total TV viewers for Robotwars versus Nascar or Formu
Re: or Driverless racing (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps in America. In the rest of the world we celebrate skill and the prestige of winning. It's terrible when a driver or rider takes a spill.
Re: (Score:2)
It will still be exciting to watch as driverless tech is new. When it's a mature technology, maybe interest will wane, but then there'll always be an new new thing to watch.
Re: (Score:1)
Robots driving is much more interesting, than people driving formula E. Formula E with humans sucks, because the cars are silent POS and the rules suck. If the robots can drive atleast some, it's much more interesting. I'd watch it.
Re:Boring (Score:4, Funny)
I'm waiting for an autonomous demolition derby. That might be interesting.
Re: (Score:1)
If you get bored waiting you could always just take your car to the crusher for the single player version.
Re: (Score:1)
Next they'll take the player out of Hockey saying it was too dangerous.
Robotic hockey might be amusing, but it's just not the same.
How the fans are going to feel? (Score:5, Funny)
No problem, they can replace the audience with robots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're using self-driving cars, you could even get Dale Earnhardt back.
Re: (Score:2)
Too soon.
Re: (Score:2)
No problem, they can replace the audience with robots.
I hear they did that in Japan I think. For baseball games.
Interesting concept (Score:2)
I like the fact that the hardware is identical, but teams can make their own software. The race also offers a nice way to measure progress in a controlled environment that still offers enough challenges to be useful in the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree completely.
There's no driver, and the hardware is identical. Software changes will only do so much, and I doubt it'll be interesting in the least.
If they allowed any vehicle, maybe with some parameters to make sure that wasn't abused (must have between 3-6 wheels, must weight between X and Y, may not use any fuel but electric batteries, etc), it'd allow for some really interesting variations. Cars *can* crash, so maybe one of them is designed to crash others and survive? Maybe some team up to ach
Re: (Score:3)
It may be slightly interesting at first,but the best ones will quickly rise to the top, and no new ones will be capable of competing
I've been watching computer chess since the 80's, and there have been quite a few changes at the top. Any team can have the next brilliant idea.
Re: (Score:2)
This won't be successful. (Score:5, Insightful)
The physical risk to the driver, and the driver's skill under pressure are what makes watching motor racing exciting.
Take them both away by replacing it with software and all you have is another boring nerdfest.
No excitement means no spectators. No spectators means no money. No money means no sport.
Re: (Score:2)
The physical risk to the driver, and the driver's skill under pressure are what makes watching motor racing exciting.
Take them both away by replacing it with software and all you have is another boring nerdfest.
No excitement means no spectators. No spectators means no money. No money means no sport.
Plus, could you see Omega trying to sell watches with some geek spokesperson?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they'll come out with their own line of Marvell character themed watches.
Re:This won't be successful. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see a lot of people assert that, but I wonder how many of them are racing fans. Personally I'd rather see robots - the race could be a lot more aggressive with nobody's life on the line.
Re: (Score:2)
I get the picture, you're right that people love the dramatica back-story but I just can't imagine the same level of emotional attachment to robots.
Can you imagine what would happen to the popularity of American Football if they replaced the players with robots? Same thing would happen with motor racing.
Re: (Score:2)
What would make it exciting? The skill of a bunch of people who pre-programmed an algorithm before the day?
Mind you we live in a Big Brother world. No not the government watching, but rather reality TV where some people's idea of a good time is to watch other people actually do something other than sit at a TV, so I guess watching some pre-programmed hunks of metal go around in circles *could* be entertaining to some people.
Re: (Score:2)
I see a lot of people assert that, but I wonder how many of them are racing fans.
I've been to a few races in my time, the danger element is the the most attractive part. No danger means no interest.
Personally I'd rather see robots - the race could be a lot more aggressive with nobody's life on the line.
Just load up demo mode on Gran Turismo and fill your boots. People respond to the emotional connection, the idea that person could die at any moment. No-one really gives a fuck about cars driving around in circles.
Re: (Score:2)
You are speaking for yourself. Many people enjoy the technology, and the person driving the car is merely there because it it unavoidable, not because it is a core part of the spectacle. F1 fans are not all Nascar fans.
Re: (Score:2)
As an F1 fan myself with a lot of frinds that also are, I can tell you that if there weren't drivers in the cars no one I know would even bother watching.
Re: (Score:2)
You are speaking for yourself. Many people enjoy the technology, and the person driving the car is merely there because it it unavoidable, not because it is a core part of the spectacle. F1 fans are not all Nascar fans.
And you are speaking for yourself. We don't have to guess about this, robots already exist, how many people turn up to watch them race today?
I'm not American so car racing to me and everyone I know is Touring Cars and F1. F1 is attractive because there's cool rock star guy getting paid millions of dollars to risk their lives traveling the word racing cars, party, and fuck beautiful women. Take all that away and it'll be exactly like a Linux convention. Good luck getting TV coverage of that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>> Have you ever been to a real race?
Yes. I've attended many pro races. I've also driven in more than a few club events over the last 30+ years usually saloon cars/GT racing.
What is this thing on Slashdot where people automatically reply with an level of arrogance/rudeness that indicates the OP must necessarily be fucking clueless?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well done for simultaneously proving my point and yourself to be a total dick.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>> run a logical fallacy marathon
What the F are you even talking about?
Will it be entertaining? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think in the early days, these races might be entertaining.
I can imagine that eventually some kind of optimum strategy may evolve and all the teams use it, and then the cars will all do the same thing and the race will be boring. But in the early days, with people trying different strategies, stuff might happen that is interesting to watch.
I remember back at my first job, we found some kind of game where you wrote a program to control a robot tank in the game, and the whole game was to have matches between people's programs. The programming language was simple and there were APIs for things like "throw out a radar ping", "turn tank", "rotate turret", "fire gun", "check to see if tank is damaged", etc. There were many different strategies available: you could write a tank that never checked if it was being damaged, but just drove around crazily all the time to be hard to lock onto; you could write a tank that, when it got a ping, would try to lock onto that tank and follow it and keep shooting it until it was dead; you could try to write a balanced tank that would check if it was damaged and evade if so, try to figure out where other tanks were and just send shots in that general direction, etc. We had great fun with it for a while, and then one of the developers (not me, sadly) wrote a tank program that was dramatically more effective than all the others. The fun died away when it became "watch Rich's tank destroy your tank and all the others".
The question is whether Rich's program was actually optimum in some sense (did the best possible according to the simple simulation rules) or whether we could have beaten it if we had been more clever. I'm not sure. I wish I had copies of the source code to all the bots from back then, now that I have a lot more experience in software development and I might get more out of the game.
This was years ago and I couldn't tell you what game it was exactly, but there are plenty of programming games [programminggames.org] around.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can imagine that eventually some kind of optimum strategy may evolve and all the teams use it, and then the cars will all do the same thing and the race will be boring.
If you all use the same safe strategy then nobody ever overtakes and there's no race at all, just cars driving in a circle. Essentially like F1 at its worst, but then... even worse. So at worst, everyone would use the same unsafe strategy, and it would basically just be betting on effectively random chance. Whose tires are just .001% better, who drives over a pebble and who doesn't. But more likely, every team would try to find places they could optimize, identifying different places and ways to push for ju
Re: (Score:1)
Some of the issue is the circuit and whether it's conducive to overtaking. For example, there's not a lot of overtaking at Monaco because there are so few places where it's actually possible to overtake. Just about the only place to overtake is the Nouvelle Chicane. I suspect the solution to a lack of overtaking would be the same type of solution that any other racing series uses: they change the rules to achieve a desired result. I'm not sure the 2017 F1 rules will actually accomplish this, but the general
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in favor of the 'bootlegger turn' restart for NASCAR.
On green flag restart, the field crosses the start finish line, throws a bootlegger turn then starts racing the _other way_.
Never happen, would require them to make right turns.
Re: (Score:1)
It's a bit more complicated than that. Autonomous vehicles rely on a constant balancing-act between calculating actions perfectly based on sensor input, and speed. The faster the vehicle travels, the less accurate the calculations have to be to keep up.
I can certainly see the potential in "one-upmanship" when it comes to equations, calculations and intepretation of sensorinput while pushing the speed to the absolute.
They could make it more fun if they banned preprogrammed track knoweledge.
Re: (Score:2)
Frankly, if can't handle crashes (cheaply), and isn't aggressively designed like the units in RoboWars, no-one will watch. Robo competitions don't have a big following atm, but if millions of dollars were pumped into the sport, and if a few good crashes and lot's of bumper car action, then maybe. After all, most of the world can't believe that eSports is a thing, so who knows?
For the human element, we could toss all the operators and techs into a mosh pit during the race.
Re: (Score:2)
Death E-Race 2017 (Score:2)
Entertaining? Sure... just release random animals out onto the track. DQ teams that hit the animals.
It should have everybody on the edge of their seats.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you get points for ruining stuff over in death race.
Re: (Score:1)
We haven't quite become Trump's America.... yet.
That's not to say things could flip back the way they were decades ago when dog and cock fighting were common and out in the open, but for the moment, our sensibilities are still a bit more humane (bordering on morbid, though).
People will still watch driverless cars race (Score:1)
No feel (Score:1)
Self driving cars aren't going to be terribly good at measuring road feel and that moment when you feel grip suddenly let go and make the correction to stay on the road.
Oh sure, the cars can measure it and graph it and log it, but they also need to respond instantly. Most of the AI driving stuff seems to assume the road will be a set geometry and properly marked and generally smooth and dry and clean. And roads are rarely like that.
All it would take to mess up AI racing is an oil slick or an animal or pe
Re:No feel (Score:5, Informative)
Self driving cars aren't going to be terribly good at measuring road feel and that moment when you feel grip suddenly let go and make the correction to stay on the road.
I wish I could see your face when I tell you that the technology to handle those situations has been mandatory in all cars (though not trucks) sold in the US since 2010. It's commonly known as ESP (electronic stability program) and there are a number of ways to actually effect changes in vehicle yaw once it is detected via accelerometer, like decelerating a slipping wheel (with the brakes) or accelerating an opposing wheel (e.g. with an electronic differential and the engine.) Slip can be detected as well (by the use of a second accelerometer) and one common response to slip is to engage traction control, which of course can induce yaw... which is then handled by the ESP.
This stuff began to become ubiquitous in high-end cars around 2000, but it was first brought to the street by Mitsubishi for the Lancer Evo IV and also used on the Galant VR4 and 3000GT VR4, under the name AYC. Even though it was the pioneer, it used the more complex and expensive electronic diff method, which is better than braking because it doesn't slow the vehicle.
All it would take to mess up AI racing is an oil slick or an animal or person or a tree falling or a part falling off another car or any number of other things for the AI to become overwhelmed.
The AI will deal with the oil slick better than a human driving a car without traction control and ESP, because it will effectively implement traction control and ESP. The vehicles already watch for obstacles. It's not that they won't ever make mistakes in these situations, but humans often do as well, so that's not a differentiating factor.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm always impressed by technology when I either see an expert driver fail to achieve something a computer has no problem with, like hill climbing on an icy slope, or your aforementioned oil slick.
But really it impresses me more to think that these days you can just slam your foot on the brake and maintain vehicle control far better than any expert driver on a pre-determined track paying 100% attention ever could. It's also re-assuring going around a corner and seeing the traction control light start flashi
Re: (Score:3)
But really it impresses me more to think that these days you can just slam your foot on the brake and maintain vehicle control far better than any expert driver on a pre-determined track paying 100% attention ever could.
Indeed. The most modern ABS can even detect when the vehicle is on a loose surface, and lock up the brakes for a moment intentionally to e.g. build up a pile of snow in front of the wheel to offer something to stop against. And traction control can be tuned to permit specified amounts of wheel slip (and differing amounts at different speeds!) so as to preserve sporty feel or to permit a limited amount of digging into the terrain so as to provide traction by removing the loose top material. Ascent control, d
Re: (Score:2)
The AI will deal with the oil slick better than a human driving a car without traction control and ESP, because it will effectively implement traction control and ESP. The vehicles already watch for obstacles. It's not that they won't ever make mistakes in these situations, but humans often do as well, so that's not a differentiating factor.
Eventually this may be true when the AI can effectively watch for obsticles like slicks as well as a human can. Right now a professional human racer, using only a crappy dual camera system, is far better at predicting the track conditions than any contemporary system with basically unlimited and far superior sensors that have a superior response time. The AI would hit the slick far too fast at which point no possible combination of steering or braking of any tires would stop a crash if it's in a turn. To
Re: (Score:2)
Today, well trained humans are far better at this than well trained AI using far superior, often almost cheating, sensing technologies.
But there is no cheating! They simply can have more senses than we can... as many as you can cram onto the car, along with enough hardware to make sense of the input. That's why they will be better than we are at driving cars. They can see things we can't. A sufficiently expensive and complicated laser system can not only tell that there's liquid on the track, but what it is, even if the sunlight is shining off of it. For example, in this press release [m2lasers.com] they talk about identification of hydrocarbons at forty
The Question Answers Itself (Score:2)
But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
This question answers itself if framed within the context of the racing genre:
"But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching paint dry, knowing that the paint wasn't applied by a real person?"
Having the cars operated by software rather than by human drivers doesn't change anything.
Americans?? (Score:1)
"..how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?"
They watch NASCAR don't they? It's pretty obvious the American race
audience doesn't have that high of an expectation.
Is it entertainment or is it research? (Score:1)
This Is What's Wrong With Slashdot (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)