Would you watch an autonomous car race? Choose by September.

The inside camera angles will be simply AWESOME!

The article also mentioned the potential danger of a person being on the track and the vehicle not recognizing it and failing to stop.

If they sealed the track from personnel and let the vehicles go at it, that could produce some very interesting results.

I think being on the track during one of these races is called "natural selection".

And can we please run it inside of a tube-track so that the ceilings become passing zones? Car racing has become so two dimensional

Only if there's a loop-d-loop...

I want to strap a saddle on one and ride it around the track. Cowboy style.

Trackmouse wrote: I want to strap a saddle on one and ride it around the track. Cowboy style.

You can only hold on with one hand. Trick is to make 8 seconds.

In reply to Adrian_Thompson: Didn't that happen in a Trans Am race last year?

i found a video of the first race:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdVAUCpVv4o

they also ran one with offroad trucks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noDi1IzuotM

Definitely would watch for the novelty for a few races. I am not sure I could become a fan of one of the teams, but I'm also not ruling it out. The cars might get so fast that it's hard to appreciate how badass the whole thing is on TV.

Would definitely be interesting in person just for the spectacle. I like the idea of a battle bots aspect.

I can't wait until their AI becomes self-aware and starts throwing protest paperwork at each other.

I would not watch. Ugly vehicles. I can't/won't watch Formula E. Boring. I don't watch Indy cars because of all the bodywork around the rear wheels looks awful. I think racing has to be a combo of sights, sounds, and human performance. Then again I'm old and my favorite F1 driver is still Jimmy Clark and if I had my way F1 cars would be flat-bottomed with a clutch pedal and an h-pattern gearbox.

In reply to JG Pasterjak:

Team K.I.T.T

I can't allow you to do that Michael

A rather disappointing update, it looks like in the first season all cars will have 100% identical hardware, only software and paint jobs will vary:

http://www.racecar-engineering.com/blogs/gravel-trap-a-wrong-turn-for-roborace/

Man, I'd rather punch myself in the dick.

GameboyRMH wrote: A rather disappointing update, it looks like in the first season all cars will have 100% identical hardware, only software and paint jobs will vary...

I don't understand why this inevitability comes as a surprise or disappointment to anyone. If the primary point is the removal of the organic computer controlling the car and replacing it with a synthetic one, it's only natural for the initial starting point to be setting up the hardware as a spec series. Autonomous racing will live and die by the variations in programming between cars, just like it currently does with the differences in drivers being more important to the spectacle than the differences in cars, so that's where it all needs to start...Then again, I also think that the author is misguided or wrong on most other accounts in these articles as well.

I'm not sure how I feel about the spec hardware. It will make for an interesting programming race - and I disagree that the whole thing could be played out in simulation, because the real world is pretty complex. Especially on street circuits, you're going to have all sorts of traction variation around the track. Heck, a Fiat Panda dumps its sump on the track two weeks before the race and all sorts of assumptions will go out the window. Usually I don't like spec racing at the higher levels, but the programming is so important I think it'll work here...for a while.

I would like to see it move into non-spec hardware later, because I like racing to encourage technical development. There's a lot of R&D to be done on autonomous cars, and it's useful R&D for the rest of us. Once the software is pretty mature, the sensor pods and processors should be opened up even if the drivetrain remains fixed. That'll spark a good arms race.

I want nothing to do with it, cool on an engineering/programing level and all but its the next automatic transmission of this era. Inevitable maybe, but I enjoy a little daily fear from dodging soccer moms in rush hour