65 replies to this topic

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Nakon prvog javnog pokazivanja robokara u Monaku Roborejs danas obavlja testiranja

 

[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Roborejs obavio prvo testiranje na ePri stazi danas u Parizu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Roborace car for driverless Formula E support series makes debut

Roborace's autonomous racing car ran for the first time in public ahead of Formula E's Paris ePrix.

The Russian-backed initiative has partnered with Formula E to showcase the development of the first driverless racing car series.

At several races this season Roborace has run a test mule known as DevBot, which includes a cockpit so a human driver could aid the development.

This weekend it brought the first version of its completely driverless car to an event for the first time.

The Robocar emerged on track shortly after the end of first FE practice, carrying out one lap at very slow speed.

Its lap was punctuated by a short stationary spell parked up by the barriers.

Roborace chief technology officer Bryn Balcombe explained this was because "we were checking the accuracy of the line round Turn 8".

He told Autosport: "It got within a couple of millimetres of the barrier and that's a bit too tight for the safety margin!

"We're changing that line at the moment just to make sure it doesn't get as close.

"The car is in its own sensing state, learning the environment. We had a vehicle following behind, but that's just a safety mechanism."

The car is due to run again after FE qualifying in similar fashion to this morning, and the intention is to run it without the need for a following vehicle.

Roborace was not present at the Monaco ePrix last week while it carried out its final software development ahead of Saturday's demonstration in Paris.

It has been testing in private for three weeks, including on a purpose-built Formula E replica track that Balcombe says allows the team to "get the sensory perception correct and be training in the right environment".

"We've done loads of testing in the background so it's kind of strange, people come up and say 'you've changed the world today' and we feel like we did that a few weeks ago," he added.

"It's a big event and to show it in public is really important to us.

"We've still got a lot of work to do before this afternoon, but it's great to be focusing on that and not the technical side. We've proven that now."

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Izvršni direktor Roborejsa Denis Sverdlov uz robokara (ovaj sivo/crveni je samo za pokazivanje, onaj drugi služi za testiranje)

 

 

 

zadnji deo robokara je pure sex

 

 

 

Posle FE kvalifikacija robokar odrađuje drugo testiranje

 

 

[Dzoni_m]

Ima snimak kruga negde? Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

Edited by Dzoni_m, 20 May 2017 - 15:24.

[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Ima snimak kruga negde? Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

 

ne, izaće na službenom dokumentarcu. na Twiteru sam nabasao na nekoliko amaterskih snimaka..

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Planning for driverless car 'races' begins

Roborace's second driverless racing car is due to be introduced this month and the initiative will now begin to work out how the first competition between its cars will work.

The Robocar made its public debut in support of Formula E's Paris ePrix last month, completing an autonomous lap of the circuit on race day.

Previously Roborace had only run its development mule, christened DevBot and based on an LMP3 car and with a cockpit so it could use a human driver while testing the software, at Formula E events.

Roborace now has three versions of 'DevBot', and chief technology officer Bryn Balcombe told Autosport the second Roborace was due some time in June.

Balcombe said that gave his company "a lot of opportunities to try different things".

Asked when a first 'race' could be expected, Balcombe replied: "It's really defining what Roborace is as a racing competition.

"If we stick to the traditional format of 10 cars just following each other around, there's very little differentiation you can have - it becomes lap time differentiation.

"We're looking at formats for the short-, medium- and long-term.

"It's not been defined yet but it includes road-relevant features, like traffic on the track.

"If you're talking about autonomous driving competition you need to push the boundary of the autonomous driver - not powertrain or chassis or aero or tyres.

"It's the ability to perceive, think and act."

Balcombe said "it's quite tight" between getting the cars back from Formula E's July 29-30 Montreal season finale and the start of the next season.

That suggests the 2017/18 curtain-raiser, set to take place in November in Hong Kong, might be too soon for Roborace to hold its first competition.

Roborace's priority for the remainder of the current Formula E season is to demonstrate to prospective entrants that the infrastructure, as well as the technology, is ready.

"The rest of the season for us is incremental developments and developing the platform to invite the teams to join," he explained.

"The team write the AI drivers, they take the risk, they define the performance level. The hardware is defined by us.

"We're gathering data so we can share that with all the teams so they can use that for training, and we're building a simulator environment in the background.

"So the objective is for us to show there's a working platform waiting for teams to arrive."

The Robocar's lap in Paris was at a very slow speed, but Balcombe insisted its pace will improve.

"The first thing is the car understands its environment in order to work out what action to take," he said.

"Speed is an action - it's making the decision, 'can the car proceed at a speed safely?'

"What we're proving is it knows where it is at all times, it knows where other objects are.

"Just like a human driver it can then start to push the limits."

[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Roborejs će obaviti test u Berlinu s robokarom nakon što se uvere da će sve proći u redu tokom današnjeg testa s DevBotom

 

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[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Robokar u Velikoj Jabuci

 

[/13/Ален Шмит/]

Roborejs će ovih par dana testirati Robokara

 

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We have a special announcement for you. A new future is coming. 13.09.17. #IAA2017 #FrankfurtMotorShow #Roborace

 

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Formula E champion Di Grassi becomes Roborace CEO



Formula E champion Lucas di Grassi has been named CEO of driverless racing series initiative Roborace.

Audi driver Di Grassi, who claimed his first FE title in a tense 2016/17 season finale in July, was a founding partner of FE and joined Roborace race as an advisor last year.

The ex-Formula 1 racer is a staunch advocate of autonomous vehicles and has reiterated his belief that the development of driverless racing can benefit traditional series.

“We want to take Roborace where motorsport cannot go, focusing the platform on future road-relevant autonomous technology,” said di Grassi. “The future of mobility is autonomous, that’s an industry consensus now.

“In the same way, I believe that motorsport is about the driver, who is the best human being behind the wheel.

“I want to develop the Roborace series to be complimentary to traditional motorsport, and not to replace it.

“We invite the OEMs, suppliers, technology companies and universities to use our platform to showcase their technology and intellectual capacity in driverless systems.

“With the technology evolving so fast we must remain flexible on the events, races and challenges we are promoting.”

Roborace completed demonstrations throughout the 2016/17 FE season, with its ‘DevBot’ test mule running in Marrakech, Buenos Aires, Berlin, New York and Montreal.

The first version of its autonomous racing car also ran for the first time in public ahead of Formula E's Paris ePrix in May, and series bosses have started to work out exactly how the ‘races’ will work.

A statement said Roborace will be using the upcoming 2017/18 season to “develop a flexible format for the competition that can adapt to the rapid developments in both the electric and autonomous industries”.

Roborace founder Denis Sverdlov will move into an advisory role as a result of di Grassi’s new position.

“We are thrilled that Lucas has agreed to come on board in an official capacity as Roborace continues to grow,” said Sverdlov.

“He brings a wealth of knowledge from other motorsport competitions he has developed and evolved and we are privileged to benefit from his experience.

“Lucas truly understands the importance of what Roborace can achieve – making our roads smarter and safer by sharing the benefits of A.I. [artificial intelligence] to advance everything from driver assistance to collision avoidance, security technologies to full autonomy.”

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ROBORACE: “THE VEHICLES WILL ACTUALLY HAVE PERSONALITIES”

In Montréal, we grabbed half an hour with Bryn Balcombe, Chief Technical Officer of Roborace, for a chat about the psychology of AI and what racing is, in a technology age. Well, technically we just meant to talk to him for ten minutes about the future of Roborace but things escalated a little and he humoured us getting a bit into what it means to call an AI a driver and whether the Robocar will ever actually offer gestures of universal respect and polite suggestions on driving improvement to its fellow drivers. This two-part interview will give you an insight into ROBORACE that you have not gotten so far.

THE STORY SO FAR

Roborace is an electric, autonomous racing championship, designed to be contested not by drivers but by programmers and technologists, via specialist racing Artifical Intelligences. In its early stages, it has been demonstrating at Formula E tracks and privately testing and developing the sensory, mechanical and programmatical technology that will allow it to ultimately launch its racing. Currently, most of its demonstration is around Devbot, an adjusted LMP3 car which can run autonomously. Soon the bespoke Robocars will hit the streets in earnest, with the beginning of autonomous racing alongside Formula E. But what does that mean, for AI and human drivers alike?

To take it back to the roots of Roborace, when you first started this project did you imagine that you’d go for something like Devbot as it is now, where it has to be mechanically operated as an LMP3 car, that is a driveable LMP3 or or did you think you’d go straight into the Robocars?

When it first started, the original idea is to use motorsport to advance technology – that’s what motor racing has been used for before. The other side of it is that you need to be able to engage the public – and that’s one of the things that motorsport is struggling to do – it’s a great challenge. Formula E’s doing a great job of building a new base for motorsport, Formula 1’s changing now to try and retain its base.

But you have to have an entertainment proposition and you have to be able to inspire the public and that’s why they created Robocar, that’s why Daniel Simon came on board to do that part. You then have the engineering elements of that, so you have to go from a 3D rendering to a manufacture-level product, that takes time. And during that process, what we created was Devbot. So while we were waiting for the final designs, in that period between concept design and product we created Devbot as a development vehicle to test out the concepts that were going into Robocar. So: four wheel drive powertrain, sensor suite, the computer architecture, is all identical on Devbot to Robocar.

Oh ok, so it actually is the same – with some variance for shape and whatever?

Yes, the only difference is we have a cockpit, and some differences in the steering mechanism because we have a human that can actually drive the car manually. But overall the idea is that you can develop software on Devbot and then you just port the software across, put it on Robocar and Robocar will work. And that’s the normal development routine that we go through at an event.

Ostensibly, the LMP3 looks very different from the Robocar but I guess it’s mechanically close to the same thing?

The main advantage is that you get to manually drive the thing, so you can test out all our power train systems, you can actually acquire a lot of data – which is what we’ve been doing here, so you can manually drive around just doing data acquisition. Now, in Robocar you can’t do that because it needs that data to drive. If it hasn’t got the data beforehand then it can’t drive. So always good to have an option to do that scanning and data acquisition manually. We then are able to run the software in the car, so we’re able to have a human in the car but monitoring that AI driving performance – so again, that’s another validation you can get, you can’t get closer to the vehicle dynamics than being in the car.

So when the human drives – obviously the driver takes Devbot for a lap, does Devbot then take the driver for a lap?

Basically – that’s exactly what happens. So you do some manual installation laps, so that’s really checking the vehicle performance, making sure everything mechanically is fine, from a human perspective.

That the brakes are working and things?

Yeah, exactly. And then the second step is that you put it into the AI mode, the driver stays in the car but takes his hand off the wheel, foot off the throttle and the brake and then he monitors the racing line and the performance of the AI driver. Once he’s confidence, he can then step out of the car and can start to do AI driver development testing.

In terms of developing the AI, it’s now within 8% of a human driver’s speed – or that was the last figure I saw?

Yeah, that was right – when we were in Berlin. But that’s a variable and that’s something that we’ll be talking about a lot more next season. Is, if you take the performance, how do you break the performance down? We look at it on three levels; you have the vehicle hardware’s performance, you then have the performance of the vehicle intelligence platform – which is the environment sensing and the communications – and then you have the performance of the AI driver. So those three things define overall performance and it’s important for us to be able to communicate that.

Does the AI driver – obviously it’s data based, it’s programmatical, it is ultimately a computer programme but does it have tracks it prefers?

Yeah, this is where you get the difference – so you would say, like a mechanical setup or an aero setup on the car will be tailored to a particular track. So that’s vehicle hardware, you can tailor the car to that. If you look at a sensor suite and the communications for the car – again, you can say that could be biased towards one type of environment or another. So when we run in Formula E tracks, for example, the lidars are really effective at looking at vertical surfaces on the walls.

Oh of course, cus you’ve got the sheer concrete barriers.

Exactly – then when you go to somewhere like Silverstone then you’re relying much more on machine vision, for example.

Because it’s not seeing an edge to the track?

You don’t have such a defined edge so yeah, for sure, the different environments we run at have different performance, if you like. So I wouldn’t call that a personality in terms of the programmatical.

No, but it’s better in certain circumstances.

Yeah. When you start to look at the personality of a driver, that’s really where the teams come in – and whether their use of sensors really affects their performance on a track, gives a sense of personality on track.

Which would be where, when you get Robocar into manufacture and the series gets going, the vehicles will actually have personalities in that respect, according to the way that they’re set up?

Somewhat – Daniel Simon described it the other day and he said that software always has a personality, that’s by Bill Gates created Windows and Steve Jobs created iOS and you have different people who are fans of each of those products and the way you use the software and the way it feels is very different. The same thing will manifest itself in cars. What’s interesting is that some of that comes through the dashboard and that human-machine interface of the car, the perception of the car but actually the personality of the car is defined by its actions.

That’s what’s really interesting. So in different countries there are different drivers that we know and know all drive a certain car in a certain way, so you can ascribe to the entire population of those car owners a particular personality. It will be the same but for autonomous vehicles. And that’s what’s really interesting, the interaction of the actions of the car define its personality. So in racing, it’s the actions but also the interactions with the other objects, with the other drivers.

So you might get like – a French Clio driver has a very different style to a British Volvo driver?

(Laughing) Yeah, so… in the UK we’re allowed to say ‘White Van Man’.

(Also laughing) Yes, yeah.

So effectively you attribute a style of driving to a certain model of vehicle because you’ve seen that vehicle being driven so many times in that way. So you’d describe that as a population. So when you then buy an autonomous…. Let’s say it’s a Toyota, for example, if the software is identical in all those vehicles then they’ll all behave the same way. So you’ll start to ascribe personality to those cars.

And there’s kind of like… as the owner of the car then you have to work out whether that personality matches your personality. And that’s what becomes really interesting. So we’ll see that play out but on a race track, in terms of whether one car pushes to overtake another car and if there’s an accident then who does the public think is in the wrong or in the right. And it’ll split the public, in the same way that Rosberg-Hamilton splits the public. You will have a particular favourite that’s built up over time, based on their actions that have gone before.

Yes definitely. I mean, the good thing about Robocar is it probably won’t storm down the pitlane having an argument with anyone.

Yeah I mean, that’s the interesting thing…