Roborace, the world’s first driverless electric racing competition, will showcase its racing platform at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham as part of Autosport International on January 11-14, 2018. Visitors will have an opportunity to get close to the Robocar at the event and to learn more about the autonomous racing event plans.
The autonomous Robocar was designed by the automotive futurist behind movies such as Tron and Oblivion, Daniel Simon,and weighs just over 1,000 kilograms (2,205 pounds) with a capability of over 200 miles per hour. It’s exterior design clearly denotes it’s driverless underpinnings.
Roborace will complement existing racing such as FIA Formula E by adding a driverless component to the motorsport arena. Roborace is aiming to give organizations developing driverless technologies an extreme, but controlled, environment to test their software and hardware. The vehicle uses the Nvidia Drive PX2 GPU as its “brain.” This unit is capable of up to 24 trillion artificial intelligence operations per second. Like Formula E has done, Roborace hopes to facilitate faster development of electric and autonomous vehicles.
Roborace is headed by race legend and now CEO Lucas Di Grassi. “It’s a pleasure to bring Robocar to the Autosport Stage. Roborace is the first and only competition series in the world for autonomous driver technologies and is therefore an important part of the motorsport world. Autosport International gives us the opportunity to meet visitors and introduce them to the incredible possibilities of autonomous technology and the very real application it will have to their own road cars in the coming years.”
Aaron is an automotive journalist living in Wyoming, USA. His background includes technology, mechanics, commercial vehicles, and new vehicle evaluations. Aaron is a member of several automotive media groups and writes for many well-known publications.