Roborace reveals a working prototype of its self-driving racecar

resource from: The verge   

It's almost been a year since we first learned about Roborace, the autonomous racing series that will run alongside Formula E next season. Since then, though, the series has been pretty tight-lipped, offering up some tantalizing renders of the cars but little in the way of information about when or how the series will run. Today we know a tiny bit more, because the series posted a video of an actual car using actual wheels and no actual human driving — very briefly — around a racetrack.

"DevBot," as Roborace calls it, is the test car that the series is using to shore up the basic software and hardware that each team will start with when the racing begins sometime during the 2016–2017 Formula E season. That means it's probably rocking the Nvidia Drive PX2 supercomputer as well as all the other autonomous tech that the series unveiled earlier this month.

In the video we see a driver pull the car down the straightaway of what appears to be England's Silverstone Circuit, hop out, and let the car take off on its own. Despite all the fancy editing, it appears that the car only gets up to a fraction of the top speed of 180 miles per hour that Roborace has boasted about in the past. But with the series keeping such a tight control on the information about what's in store, we'll take every little scrap we can get. That Roborace is finally putting wheels to pavement is a very good sign, and it's the first tangible proof that the (extremely nerdy) series is coming together.

resource from: The verge

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